Life At The Center of Weird
by beb
Summary: Discovering that his girlfriend is trying to kill Hank Venture has put Gary, the former 21, in a slump. Now he's trying to get back on track by finding a rumored walking tree, but that's only the start of the weirdness that is the Venture Compound.
1. Chapter 1

Gary awoke to someone lightly slapping him on the cheek. The slapping was quite annoying so he grabbed at the hand and missed. His reflexes weren't what they used to be. He opened a blurry eye and saw Dr. Thaddeus Venture, short, bald, hunched, leaning over him, preparing to slap him on the cheek some more. "Go to hell," Gary told him and closed his eyes.

"I'm waiting for my breakfast," the doctor told him crossly. "I've been waiting for half an hour."

"I'm your body guard, not your cook," Gary said, rolling over. Recliners are not designed to be slept in on one's side so this wasn't particularly comfortable.

"And you're not doing a very good job of that either." Gary didn't argue the point. "I expect you in the house in fifteen minutes. I want two eggs over easy and don't break the yolks this time. Two pieces of toast - use the white bread - and cut the crusts off. And some of that peach preserve on the side."

"Don't you think it's time you learned to cook for yourself?" Gary asked from his huddle.

"Don't you think it's time your got over your girlfriend trying to kill us all and get back to your job?" Dr. Venture countered.

"I'm on disability?"

"You had some minor cuts and scraps. Dr. Billy fixed you up at the time. That was a month ago. How long do you plan to nurse this out?"

"I've got six weeks medical leave."

Dr. Venture poked Gary in the side. "If you don't get out of that chair soon it's going to take a forklift to get you got of it!"

Gary rolled on his back and took stock of himself. True the buttons on his shirt were straining to hold in his guts. He had three day's stubble on his chin - and it wasn't a good look for him! And his teeth tasted of rotting food.

"I need you to get up and take charge of the boys. Hank has become insufferable about his 'Super-Hot Nemesis.' It doesn't seem to sink in that his 'Super-Hot Nemesis' is trying to kill him. He also seems to think that he's the first boy adventurer with his own nemesis."

Kim. Kim Kim. Gary had spent a lot of time while recovering from his injuries thinking about the girl who had given them to him. Kim Duquesne. Tall, buxom, smart, funny. A hell of a lot younger than him. Good in bed. The first girl who had ever looked back at him and smiled. And she had to have decided to become a super-villain. As a reformed former henchman Gary wasn't particularly bothered by that. What was an issue was that because of one - one! - bad date with Hank Venture she had decided that he would be her arch enemy. And as the Venture's newest body guard it was his duty to keep Hank alive from super-villains - like his girlfriend.

He felt something settle on his chest. "Consider it a performance review," Dr. Venture said and walked out.

Gary picked up the folded sheet of paper and opened it. It read "Notice of Termination" It was dated today and bore his name. It listed ten things he should have been doing and hadn't gotten around to. At the bottom there was a line for Dr. Venture to sign. He hadn't - yet. But the day was early.

Gary set the recliner n its upright position.

"Man, you have been letting yourself go," said the ghost of his old friend, Henchman 24.

"Are you real or a psychotic projection of my Id?" Gary asked.

"Isn't that something you have to work out? I mean how can I prove that I'm real?"

"You could tell me something I don't know?"

"But how would you know that I'm telling you something you really don't know and not something you're just making up or were wishing it were true."

"You could tell me Kim's current phone number so I could call her up and see if she's OK?"

"I doesn't work that way."

"Because you're not allowed to interfere?"

"No, because I have no more of an idea where she is then you do. I'm a ghost not a fortune teller."

Gary got up and stumbled into the restroom in his little guard shack. He filled the sink with hot water and washed his face, neck and arms. He held the hot washcloth to his face for a full minutes and when he took it away his face was pinkish and somewhat more alive then it had been. He rooted around in the pile of containers on the side of the sink till he found the shaving cream. The razer blade looked kind of rusty but he didn't have another one handy so he shaved with that. In view of the numerous cuts he was stickering up with toilet paper, he decided to forgo the aftershave.

"So what have you been up to all this time?" Gary asked the ghost of his friend.

"Not moping over the fact that my girlfriend tried to kill me."

"It's kind of hard to care about anything when there'll never be a change for happiness again in my life."

"What! You're not stoked about the 3D release of the Star War movies?"

"Compared to losing Kim? I guess not."

"Come on, you can't let a little thing like that get you down? Whatever happened to the General 21 I used to know?"

"You never knew me during my General 21 days. You were dead, remember?"

"How can I forget? You keep reminding me."

"And besides, after you died I kind of fell apart, then, too."

"I never knew you cared so much for me until then. But - you know, you did finally turn it around and made something of yourself. Maybe it's time you got back up on that bike and win one for the gipper."

"OK, 24. That didn't even make any sense."

"I'm not good at motivational speaking. I'm just saying you're a henchman at heart and henchmen aren't allowed to have feelings. They have to go do the job, no matter what it is, no matter if it breaks their heart!"

"That's a load of crap."

"I was quoting you, dumbass. That was from one of your introductions to the Cocoon speeches."

"It's still a load of crap."

"Is it, Gary. Is it?"

Gary had stripped off his clothes and was fumbling through a drawers under a countertop looking for something fresh. And then for something not quite as ripe as what he'd taken off. The only thing left that was clean and fit was someone's old jumpsuit with "Hatred" stitched over the pocket.

"So what have you been up to?" he asked the ghost as he piled up his clothes in a empty box to take to the laundry room .

"I've been hanging around the showers in this old convent."

"Isn't that kind of pervy, even for you?"

"What do you want me to do. It gets boring waiting for you to talk to me. And besides, I'm a ghost! What can I do? I'm just looking. Lots of nice ladies were there, though from their language I don't think they were nuns. But they left recently."

"That was a secret Blackhearts training center," Gary interrupted. "I mentioned the presence of a school somewhere in town and the OSI sent out a swat team to find it. They tracked it to that old Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows convent but the Blackhearts had already pulled out by the time they got there."

"So I should blame you for not having anything more interesting to watch then TV?" 24 groused.

Gary sat down on a stool by the countertop and put his head on his arms.

"You're not going to sleep again?" 24 asked.

"I'm trying to get up the nerve to walk out that door. Today's the first day of the rest of your life - blah blah blah. Frankly I'm not sure I'm ready for that."

"What you need to do, my friend, is go out there and find another girlfriend. You've had rotten luck with then so far - Dr. Girlfriend, Kim - but who's to say your luck won't change. That Triana Orpheus is kind of cute, and she's not dating anyone."

"She Kim's best friend. Every time I look at her I think about Kim. Besides she's like family. The sister I never had."

The ghost of 24 threw up his hands. "You're impossible, you know!"

"I know. Well, I'd better get over to the residence before Dr. Venture tries to do his own cooking. You'd think a super-scientist could at least boil water without burning the pan!"

[]

Gary had intended to have just a cup of coffee and a slice of toast for breakfast. Then had another slice. Then fried up an egg. By the time he went out for his morning's exercise he was feeling a little bloated. Since he hadn't run in a while he took a easy slow pace. He had only gotten half way to the back of the Venture Compound when he throw himself to the ground, panting like a dog and trying hard not to be as sick as one as well.

The ground was soft, the sun was warm and he soon found himself pleasantly relaxed and in a better frame of mind than he'd been in since the fight with Kim. As the visit from his old friend, the ghost of 24, had reminded him, henchmen do not have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves. And as long as Kim stayed away from the Ventures he could continue to love her - in an abstract sort of way. And if she did show up trying to kill Hank, he'd just have to deal with it then. But for now he didn't have to worry about those things. And he should think about doing some of the stuff he'd been hired to take care of around here.

There was the door to the panic room that needed replacing. He was going to call in a contractor but Dr. Venture had objected to the cost. He knew enough carpentry and welding to do the job, so no problem. Working on the panic room, though, reminded him of Kim. Clearing out the broken equipment from the workroom outside the panic room where he and Kim had fought likewise reminded him too much of Kim, as did scrubbing away all the blood in the room, much of which was Kim's blood.

There was a lobby to Venture Enterprises - which Kim had shot up. The brush pile Kim had set afire. Did everything have to remind him of Kim? He caught sight of the woods at the back of the Venture Compound. That reminded him of the walking tree Dr. Orpheus's daughter had claimed to have seen. 'Claimed' wasn't the right word since there had been evidence - inconclusive evidence - that something had entered the empty manufacturing building like she'd said, and it didn't leave footprints like a man or an animal. And that brush pile Kim had set on fire - something had tried to put it out by pulling the pile apart.

Could someone or something be possibly hiding in the woods on the Venture Compound? As head of security (the entirety of security for that matter) he ought to look into that. And since nothing about it reminded him of Kim it seemed like the perfect first item on his to-do list. A walking tree, though, seemed pretty ludicrous. True, the Venture Compound was, like, the center of weirdness in the tri-state area. A walking tree? It can't be weirder than some of the other things he'd seen. Still it might be a good idea to find out exactly what he was up against, maybe get some pictures of it first. How to do that, he wondered. Rigging up anight-vision camera would be no trouble but how to get the tree or whatever in front of the camera? What would a walking tree most desire? Water! So if he dug a little pond, maybe, and set up a night-vision camera... Yeah, that sounded like a plan. A nice project for the afternoon. Get the boys involved and out of their father's hair. Yeah. With the sun shining down warmly and at peace for the moment, Gary fell asleep.

* * *

"A Day in the Life of a Re-formed Henchman" was a 'what-if' story set between the end of the fourth season of The Ventures and the upcoming start of the fifth season. "Day" was a first story arc based on the idea that Gary, Henchman 21, having quit the Monarch, is recruited by OSI and becomes the Ventures Bodyguards when their current bodyguard, Sgt. Hatred goes AWOL. I started stories that pick up Kim's life where "Day" left off, and also what happened to Gary in the aftermath of "Day." I'd gotten part ways into both stories when I got distracted and started on another Danny Phantom story. Recently I realized that season five is steadily approaching and I ought to get these stories posted before my whole premise gets shot down by VB canon. This story begins before Kim resurfaces so I'm posting it first.


	2. Chapter 2

"Man, I'm tired," declared Hank, throwing his shovel on the ground and collapsing on the grass beside it. "How long is it going to take to finish this hole."

"A lot longer if you keep laying down on the job every five minutes!" his brother complained, throwing a shovel full of dirt at but not actually on his brother. Hank was a husky blond while Dean was a slender redhead. It a was hard to believe that they were fraternal twins.

"It's a trap, not a swimming hole," said Gary who was still busy cutting the sod into small squares that could be sliced free with a shovel and laid to one side. Gary intended to fill in the pond once it serviced it purpose and wanted to keep the sod alive until then.

"I thought it was kind of shallow for swimming." Hank said, pitching small pieces of clod back at his bother. "Can I cut the punji sticks?" Hank sighed and laid back with his arms crossed behind his head. "There's nothing like a deep pit filled with sharpened stick to stop a man in his tracks.

"It's not that kind of a trap,:" Gary replied. "Besides I think it's against the law in this state to set lethal mantraps."

"The Law! - They never let you have any fun!" Hank said. He got up and grabbed his shovel and started digging again.

"We've got something wandering around the Venture Compound," Gary said. "It's tall, green and kind of looks like a tree. It's also quick so I've never had a good look at it. As head of Venture security I don't like unknown things wandering freely about."

"Did you ask Pop?" Dean asked.

"Yeah. He either doesn't know and doesn't want to admit that, or knows - and doesn't want to admit to it." Gary said. "So I'm going to have to catch it myself. I asked myself" what would a walking tree want most?"

"Brains?" Hank hazarded.

"Water!" Gary continued as if he hadn't heard Hank. "I figure if we put out a watering hole here this walking tree thing, or whatever if is, will come out in the open and we can get some pictures and maybe figure out how to capture it."

"Why not leave it where it is?" Dean wondered as he continued to work. "It hasn't done anything to hurt anybody."

"Yet!" Gary answered. "It hasn't done anything suspicious - _yet!_"

"How deep do you want this hole?" Hank asked.

"About a foot deep. We saw it sucking water out of dip in a factory floor in building 14. That's why I think it's hungry for water but probably won't take much to get its roots wet. That's what we're not making this pond why wider than this."

"Hey, here comes Triana," Dean said, who stood up straight and began brushing the dirt off his clothes.

Gary looked in the direction Dean had pointed. The purple haired daughter of Dr. Orpheus was walking their way, flip-flops flapping with each step. She was wearing a red two piece polka dot bathing suit, a towel around her neck and a floppy hat on her head. As she got closer Gary could see that what he had taken for polka dots prints on her suit were skulls . And that she had a set of suspenders clipped to her trunks also with skulls printed on them.

"Hey," she said when she got there. "So this is the ol' swimmin' hole Dean was talking about. Somehow I had the impression that the hole was already dug."

"Hi, Triana. You're looking good in that bathing costume." Dean said. "It really brings out your - ah -ah -ah -"

"Eyes! Dummy," Hank finished for him with a bit of a laugh. "Costume!" he half-whispered to himself"

Gary was always amazed there could be two people less adept at talking to people as Hank and Dean Venture. Rather than let Dean stew in his own juices he asked, "where you do get a bikini like that? Is there, like, a Necromancer's outlet store or something?"

"Oh, I made it." she said. "I got the cloth from JoAnn Fabrics last year during their Halloween sale. - 'cause I like the skull motif, not because I knew I was going to become a witch, you know."

"Yeah, that Adam Ant, thing," Gary remembered her explanation for her favorite T-shirt.

"You can make your own clothes?" Hank asked in amazement. Most of his clothes came either off the rack or from his father's endlessly deep chest of cast-off clothes.

"Oh, sure, it's no big thing. - for girls, I guess. You just get a pattern, follow the instructions. It's easy. Well, the hard part was stitching in the liner." She causally turned down the side of her bottom to show that the inside was coated with another fabric, something pink and kind of foamy looking. Dean turned beet-red from embarrassment. Hank wasn't far behind. Gary was a little surprised by her casual display as well, mostly because she's always seemed a little reticent around the Venture brothers.

"Where did you find those suspenders?" he asked.

"Hardware store. Can you believe it? They have this huge section of construction worker clothes. And then I saw this kind of under other stuff and just had to have it." She snapped the eleastic on the strap. "They had a flag design, flames and these skulls. I couldn't resist. Actually it was these suspenders that inspired me to make this bathing "costume," Dean." She emphasized 'costume'. giving Dean a stern look.

Gary paused to look around his dirt hole. It would large enough. He walked out to the middle and started digging out the middle. "So why'd you come out here in that get-up," he asked as he dug, "not that it isn't cute and all, but it's not your usual thing."

Triana blushed. "Someone" - she looked at Dean - "said they were making a swimming hole today and that it would soon be operational. Someone" - she looked at Dean again - "clearly misinformed me. I thought if I was going out to a swimming hole I ought to preemptly wear a bathing suit in case someone - ("I'm sorry," Dean wailed) - "tried to suggested we go skinny dipping."

"A reasonable precaution," Gary said, throwing dirt onto a quickly growing pile. "But we're only making this about a foot deep. It's more of a mud wallow than a swimming hole. If you want to go swimming why don't you use the pool at the Venture Residence. I'm sure Dr. Venture wouldn't mind." Gary suggested.

"Actually he does. He unloaded on me a while back about not want any 'trollop' hanging around his boys. I had to look up the meaning of "trollop." He's just lucky I couldn't work magic back then or he'd be a newt today! I am not a trollop!"

"Sorry you were lured here under false pretences. And if you turn Dean into a Newt could you at least put him in a terrarium and label it so I'll know where to find him." Gary tried to say it lightly, since it was just a joke, but Dean grew pale and nearly dropped his shovel from suddenly nerveless fingers.

"It's OK. I enjoy men working - I could watch it all day." Triana laughed and spread her blanket on the ground, then sat on it.

"So why the mud hole? Is Dr. Venture bringing in some pigs to experiment on?" She asked.

"No, I'm trying to capture that walking tree of yours."

"That thing? I thought you decided it was a hallucination?"

"I've seen it a couple times since. Just quick glimpses. The kind where you're not even sure you saw what you saw. But that first time it looked like it was sneaking into the old manufacturing wing in order to get a drink. I'm setting up a pond here with a webcam so if it comes around I'll finally have a record of it."

"Have you even asked Dr, Venture if he's responsible for this thing?" Triana wondered. She stretched out on the blanket and plopped her floppy hat over her head. Gary felt a lump in his throat. With her long legs stretched out there she reminded him of Kim. Kim had long legs that she liked to- -

"After that Venturestein fiasco,"Triana said from under her hat, "who knows what kind of deviltry he's got up to."

"Venturestein?" Gary echoed.

"Oh, yeah. Pop brought a dead guy back to life," Hank explained.

"He kind of used parts from different bodies. It was gross." Dean added.

"And stupid."

"R-i-g-h-t..." Gary found this all a little unbelievable even though he would be the first to tell you that weird stuff was the Normal on the Venture Compound. "Where's he get the bodies?

Hank suddenly looked away and Dean blushed, then said, "I think it was from one of your - I mean the Monarch's - raids on us."

"So Venturestein is one of my comrades?"

"Yeah," Dean reluctantly admitted.

"But it's not like he's around here anymore, Hank added. "Pop sold him to the military along with a few other zombies he's made, maybe twenty in all."

"And they were all henchmen?"

"I don't know, maybe."

Gary stopped digging and leaned on his shovel thinking about this. He'd lost a lot of friends over the years, attacking the Ventures. It was strange to think that maybe they were still alive. Only now slaves to the Military-Industrial Complex. It was kind of spooky because death was supposed to be the big sleep, the final curtain, the end to a bad game. But if Dr. Venture could bring the dead back to life...When would it all end."

"I guess they didn't work out," Dean said, "because that was a while ago and Pop's never made any since."

"They were, like, zombies. They probably started attacking people to eat their brains." Hank suggested.

"No they weren't zombies," Dean countered and the two boys started squabbling. Meanwhile Triana was looking at the boys with a mixture of confusion and disgust.

"Do you really think Dr. Venture created some kind of Frankenstein's monster?" he asked her.

"Wouldn't put it past him. Maybe that's what we're chasing here. Frankenstein's monster was pretty big, you know."

Gary shook his head. "You've got a point about it being big but I don't see how it would be green or look like a tree. Besides I'd rather deal with one monster at a time." He turned to the boys who were still arguing, "Hank! Dean! Put a cork in it. Hank, you go up to the number seven entrance. You'll find some garden hose. Start stringing it down here. Dean, go up to the Residence and make up a pitcher of lemonade and maybe some sandwiches if there's any bread left.

After the boys left Gary continued digging in the hole, leveling it out and making it an even foot deep all around. Triana lay back and covered her eyes with her hat again. "Ever hear from Kim?" she asked.

"I was hoping she give you a call."

"Nothing. Do you think she's alright?"

Gary dug for a bit in silence. He didn't really want to talk about Kim, didn't want to think about her. "Like I said at the time, if the Blackhearts didn't want her alive she would wouldn't have left the grounds alive."

"But she was really beat up and bleeding..."

'One of the things you learn early on as a Henchman is how to give First Aid. MASH hospitals could learn a lot from henchman first aid."

"So...?" Triana persisted.

"So she's either alive and a prisoner with the Blackhearts, or she's live and escaped. Until she gets in touch with us we'll never know. You can't do a seance or anything and find her?"

"If I could, I would have before this." Triana sighed and rolled over on her back. "You can't find here with all your connections with the Guild of Calamitus Intent?" she asked.

"The Guild is more an insurance company for super-villains," Gary confessed. "They do maintain a semblance of order among the villains but they're not a lost-and-found department."

Gary was finishing up leveling the little pond. "Here comes Hank with the hose," he observed.

"Is it just me or does Dean seem a little sharper than he used to?" she asked.

Gary had noticed that, as well, and had a theory about it. The boys were actually clones of the original Venture twins, the 14th set actually. Their father had run a secret clone lab where he's grown dozens of replacement sets of the boys. Whenever the boys got killed, he'd untank a new set and pump their brains full of past memories recorded from their sleepbeds. At least that was the plan until the OSI went to war against the Ventures and the unformed clones used as an army to defend the compound. That was the end of the clone farm, leaving this Hank and Dean as the only remaining Venture brothers. What Gary had come to suspect was that pumping all that information into the boy's brains left way too much of it unassimilated. Any real world experiences were limited to their actually time out of the tanks. The longer that boys were out of the tank the more they were growing up. Gary had no idea whether they would ever become "normal" - their father wasn't much of a role-model in that regard, but there was the possibility that given time they might become... less weird.

"Do you really want to be a part of all this?" Gary asked. "I mean, walking trees, Frankenstein monsters, Arch-enemies dropping in out of the sky when you least expect it."

"It beats clerking at Wal-Mart." Triana stated emphatically.

"There are days when I'd kill for a chance to just be a clerk."

Hank was holding a large reel in his arms and letting the hose play out behind him as he walked. He wasn't paying attention to the reel so when the last of the hose ran out the reel jerked to a stop because the end had been clipped to the reel. And a second later Hank did a near perfect pratfall as the non-moving hose jerked him out from under his feet.

"You know, maybe you should go back to school. Because if you intent to stay around here I think you're going to need all the magic possible to survive."

[]

The first night the boys wanted to sit up with Gary and keep watch for the walking tree. Gary hadn't actually planned to stay up himself. That's what videotape was for. A DVR would have been nicer but the Ventures were largely stuck in the 70s so tape it was. And two inch reel-to-reel tape at that.

The boys had trucked in around 9 with sleeping bags, popcorn and several board games. By ten o'clock they were fast asleep, much to Gary's relief. He turned out the lights and dreamed of giant vegetables carrying his ex-girlfriend and would be assassin, Kim Duquesne up the side of the Empire State Building while Hank and Dean in vintage biplanes buzzed around overhead, before they collided and fell to the earth. Gary wasn't sure but he thought he was in an armored zeppelin about to aim twin turbo-blasters from the Millennium Falcon when the morning sun woke him. He let the dream replay a couple times before getting up and replaying the night's videotape. Kim, Kim, Kim... Why did she have to go all crazy on him. The only thing worse than going 28 years without having sex was knowing that you're not going to have sex for the remaining 50+ years of your life.

The zing of the rewinding tape woke the boys, who were, of course, disappointed that they hadn't stayed up up night. Playback showed nothing happening for hours, then the motion detector switched the camera from one frame every two seconds to continuous recording. At first Gary couldn't see what happened triggered the motion detector then he saw a small brownish, masked figure come into view. The raccoon was carrying a half-eaten piece of pizza from the garbage, which it carefully washed in the muddy pond water before eating.

The boys were "aw, he's so cute. Can we keep him?"

"Ask your dad," he told them knowing how far that idea would get.

Nothing else happened through the rest of the video

Or for the next several days, except that nightly the raccoon would come with some choice pickings from the garbage, wash it the water, as raccoon's do before eating. When on the fourth day it came with a fresh peanut butter and jelly sandwich Gary had to bawl out the boys for feeding the wildlife.

But the fifth day the raccoon didn't come. Instead something shadowy in the night-vison lens hung around the edge of the pond. It stayed around, motionless for the longest time, visible only as something that obscured the light from the moon. Finally it went away. Gary arranged that the next night, if the motion detector picked up anything, it would ring an alarm in the guard shack. He wanted to see this thing in real-time.

The alarm woke him out of a random, albeit disturbing dream of his time with The Monarch. It took him a moment to get the images of that out of his mind and look to see what the motion detector had found. Slowly and with a certain amount of stealth, a large object was gliding into the frame of the video camera. Glided seemed the right word to describe its motion because it wasn't jerky the way large animals are when they walk, putting one foot in from of the other, then moving the other foot.

The creature seemed to be circling the pond, before finally slipping into the water with a slight shudder of its leaves. Using the pond as a reference, it was about eight feet tall, with a narrow trunk may two feet wide, running with a slight curve up to a crown maybe six feet wide of tightly curled leaves. The camera broadcast in a green tinted black and white image so Gary had no idea what colors might be present, but he had to admit that it looked like a giant spear of broccoli. A walking spear of broccoli?

Gary set about making some photos of the creature. He'd show these to Dr, Venture in the morning and find out of the Doctor was in any way involved with this. Weird stuff happened on the Venture Compound all the time. It was like the Bermuda Triangle of Big-Time Science. Visitors from space, visitors from time, strange dimensions. With Dr. Venture around anything could happen. For that matter it could easily be some escape experiment he didn't want to talk about. Knowing how most people feel about broccoli, and not just the eight foot walking kind, Gary could understand the reticence. Still, he would have to do something about it before there was a panic.

When the creature finally left the pond, Gary laid back down to rest. He left the recording running in case the creature came back but finally he had the physical confirmation that the walking tree existed.

* * *

At one point while writing "A Day in the Life of a Reformed Henchman" I decided that I needed to throw in a lot of plot complications just so I could pick up so piece of weirdness to advance the plot. And just as quickly I decided I wanted to wrap up this first story arc quickly. So about the only thing that got into the series was "Tree." I had something of an elaborate back-story for Tree and a concept for this annoying visitor from elsewhere. So when I decided to write something about Gary's response to discovering that his girlfriend is a arch villain it seemed like the place to use Tree.


	3. Chapter 3

When you're planning to run a varmint off your property you need something to persuade it to leave. A broom, or a shovel, or maybe a small rifle, depending on the size of the varmint. What do you take along when the varmint is an eight foot tall walking tree? Even a shotgun didn't seem adequate against a creature that like as it had no vital organs and whose bark was probably proof against shotgun pellets. So Gary's first step was to find Dr. Venture.

Dr. Venture was sprawled out of the couch in the family room with The View blaring on the TV, eyes closed.

"Hey!" Gary said loudly, "Dr. Venture."

Dr. Venture sat up with an irritated "What? Can't a man watch the news without being interrupted every five minutes?"

"The View?" Gary waved at the TV. "Getting in touch with your feminine side?"

"It's a very intellectual, stimula - Oh, what is it? Did the boys kill themselves again?"

"Hardly. You've got pests on the grounds."

"So deal with it. I thought you were the professional. Why waste my time over what - squirrels?"

"Walking Trees. I've been meaning to ask you about that. Is this one of your projects?"

"Why do you automatically assume that every little mutant, zombie or rogue mechanism is my fault?"

"Well, you are the mad scientist here."

"I am not mad but you are getting on my last nerve - oh 'mad' scientist. How funny."

"Yeah, but about the walking tree... Before I go and blow it up I wanted to know if this was one of your experiments that you didn't think to tell me about. Because I'd hate to set back the advancement of science by interfering."

"Are you getting smart with me? My god, you're beginning to sound just like the boys. I think you're spending way to much time with them."

"I'm their bodyguard, remember. I have to spend time with them."

"Oh, right. "What the hell are you talking about, a walking tree?"

"Just checking, boss. The tree exists. I videotaped it getting a drink at the mudhole I made last night. I thought I ought to track it down today. But you didn't have anything to do with this, is that what you're saying? No forgotten experiment, no crossing of animal and vegetable tissues. No mucking around in things man was not meant to muck around in?"

"If this thing is up and walking around like you say, then it isn't anything of mine. I've never been that lucky."

"What about that To-do list on the fridge? You've got 'beat God at his own game' crossed off.

"Oh, that. I may have been experimenting with bringing the dead back to life. It didn't pan out. The first squad I sent to General Manhower sort of-" he finished with a mumble.

"Sort of - what?" Gary insisted.

"Went rogue. There! Are you happy. And no, none of them had any plant material in them.

"Fair enough. Oh, here's some photos of the thing." Gary tossed the print-outs on Dr. Venture's lap. "Look familiar?" Dr. Venture looked at the pictures, squinting to make the grainy pictures clearly. He seemed to get a little pale and muttered something that sounded like "Martians." Then he shook his head. "Nope, never saw anything like that."

"So you don't mind my getting rid of it?"

"The sooner the better!" Dr. Venture answered promptly, too promptly. Gary wondered what he was concealing but knew he'd never get anything out of the doctor.

"I'd like to borrow your death ray," he said.

"I don't have a death ray. If I did you can be sure I'd be trotting that puppy out for Manhower. Of course he _says_ that the military is only interested in non-lethal weapons these days. Some treaty or another that they signed. I mean really, this is the war department. Who ever heard of fighting a war with Nerf guns?"

"I meant your wireless TASER."

"Oh that? Go ahead, take it. I never could get the voltage regulator to work properly. It'll knock your socks off if you accidentally touch the beam."

"I know. I was there when you did."

"I was scrapping burnt nylon socks off my heel for a week. Worse invention I ever made. It's too lethal for commercial use and the military is suddenly all namby-pamby about killing people. Why do you want it?"

"If I'm going looking for that walking tree, I figure I need a big stick handy when I talk to it. Something bigger than these." Gary clicked the release causing the twin knife blades to pop out of their sleeves. There were eight inches long and slightly curved. He had intended for them to resemble Wolverine's retractable claws. But unlike comic book characters, eight inches of hard steel has to rest somewhere when it's not in use.

"Are you any good at pruning hedges with those things.?" Doctor Venture asked as he lead Gary towards a basement workshop.

"I can gut fish pretty good with them..."

"Assuming that thing has a nervous system for this thing to tingle." Doctor Venture said as he pulled out the wireless Taser from a pile in a cheap metal locker with sundry other half-finished devices, "This little doodad ought to give it a jolt."

"It runs on batteries?" Gary asked.

"It's got enough batteries in it you could use it to pound a guy into the ground."

"Fresh batteries?"

The doctor pointed to a shelf where a pile of square, fist-size units with Venture Industry labels on them were stacked. "I've got a while warehouse of them, something my old man whipped up while catching his wind from banging celebrity models. They seem to have retained their charge after all these years. Three of them fit into the stock. That'll give your about a minutes of continuous fire. The trigger is set to give you a 10 millisecond burn, which ought to be enough to knock out an elephant."

"That ought to be good enough," Gary said. He slung the gizmo over his shoulder. "If I'm not back in time for supper, there's leftovers in the fridge."

"Try not to get killed - because I'm not paying for your funeral." the doctor told him with a shake of his head. He went back to the TV.


	4. Chapter 4

Gary was half-way across the vast meadow that was the center of the Venture Compound when he heard his name called. Turning, he saw Triana Orpheus running after him. She was wearing striped black and white knee socks, a short, black shirt and a cropped T-shirt, black, naturally, with a large skull printed across the front. Her shirt was moving crazily up and down as she ran, reminding Gary of why female athletes all wore sports bras.

He stopped and waited for her. In the short while he'd known her he had never seen Triana run. He figured it must be something important.

"What's up?" he asked when she caught up with him. But she was suddenly out of breath. She braced her arms on her knees while panting in between fits of coughing.

"You have really got to cut down on your smoking," Gary said.

"I thought - we had - an - agree - ment - not to - talk - about - my smoking." She panted.

"I thought I was just making an observation," Gary said. "I wasn't trying to... Well, I guess it came out like a criticism. But geeze, Triana, if you're that out of breath after a short run like that..."

Triana straightened up and with a long sigh tried to slow her panting into more normal breathing. "You got any water?" she asked.

Gary pulled a bottle he had stuck in a pocket and handed it to her. She took a long pull on the water, then dump about half of the bottle over her head. Her purple-dyed hair had been damp and stringy from sweat. Now it glistened in a tight cap around her head. "Thanks," she said, handing what was left back to the burly henchman.

"I guess I deserve that crack about my smoking," she confessed. "It seems like I'm smoking all the time. I've been thinking a lot, lately.

"What's stressing you out? I thought you left your mother because it was so stressful there?"

Triana shrugged. "Yeah, she drawled. "Look, I need to talk to Dean. Do you know where he's at?"

Gary wondered what she had to say to Dean that would cause her to run half across the meadow from her father's residence. "He's in the X-1's hanger. Hank and him are playing with their remote controlled airplanes.

"Oh." Triana made a face. "I was really hoping to catch him alone."

"Sorry. Is it that important?" He couldn't actually imagine anything so important that Triana needed to talk to Dean in private.

"Well, kinda." For the first time she noticed the strange device Gary was holding in his one hand. "What's that?"

"I'm going Wabbitt hunting"

"Wabbitt?" Triana wondered. "with a 'w'?"

"Well, it could be a Snark or a Boojum but it's probably a Wascally Wabbitt?"

"No, seriously, what are you doing?"

"I'm looking for that walking tree of yours. Finally caught some picture of it at the mudhole we dug last week. So now I'm going to politely last it to leave."

"With that?"

"It's a wireless TASER. Some Dr. Venture cooked up a while ago. Basically it projects a small lightning bolt. I figure I'll need some like this in case the tree doesn't want to go. See ya." He said and started walking towards the woods behind the various building on the Venture Compound.

A moment later he was surprised to see Triana catching up with him. "I really wanted to talk to Dean in private," she said, but I guess I kinda wanted to talk to you about it, too."

"What's that?"

"I decided to go back to my mother's place."

"Even with the Outrider there?" Triana had returned to her father earlier in part because she couldn't get along with her mother's new husband.

"I'm setting some new ground rules, it's going to be home schooling with mom, and at least once a month I come back to spend some time with Dad. And the Outrider has nothing to do with how I live or with my education."

"Dean will be crushed. What brought on this change of plans?"

"I had a long talk with The Master."

"Who?"

"My father's mentor. His spirit guide from the netherworld."

"And he said you should go back to your mother to continue your magical education?"

"Not in so many words, but then he rarely says what he means directly." Triana was quiet for a moment then continued, "actually now that I think about it, he's a chronic liar."

"Your father's mentor?"

"Yeah, well. It's not like everything he says is a lie but he's always trying to manipulate me into doing whatever it is he wants. The first time I wandered into the nether realm he disguised himself as a middle-aged Dean Venture and said that if I stayed here I'd end up married to Dean." There was kind of twist to her lips as she said that.

Gary wondered, "would that be so bad?" even though the idea of Dean being married to any one seemed pretty unlikely. The boy was just incredibly naive about everything in the world.

"His middle-aged Dean was pretty disgusting: bald, pot-bellied, neurotically fussy and he talked about how our baby was some kind of genetic disaster. I wanted to run screaming from the place right then and there, but I knew I'd get lose in the underworld unless the Master showed my the way out. Later I got to thinking, most middle-aged men are bald. His father certainly is. And they have little pot-bellies, but then by the time I'm in my thirties or forties I bet I'm not going to be any beauty queen. I'll probably be fat and wrinkly with boobs down to my knees and everything. It's kind of a shock to think about but I realized later while study magic with my mother that The master is The Prince of Liars."

"You mean he's Sa-"

"Shh! Don't say that!" Triana exclaimed.

"What, like Lord Vortemort, we're not supposed to say his name?"

"Ah..." Triana blushed. "Those books are full of crap but some thing, they're kind of true. Just don't say that name. It'll lead to trouble..."

"Knowing all this, you still went in to have a talk with him?"

I figure knowing that he's going to lie going in I could separate his lies from the truth, and all that notwithstanding, he knows more about magic than anyone else I know."

"Was he still disguising him like a middled-aged Dean Venture, like last time?"

Triana flinched. "No. It was worse. He looked like...Have you ever seen a man turned inside-out?"

It was Gary's turn to flinch. "Yeah," he whispered.

"Oh? It was disgusting! Of course he was doing it to keep me off balance and too sick to think straight."

"He was a good guy," Gary was speaking without listening to Triana. "Friendly, cheerful. Smart as hell. Worked on the anti-gravity engines on the Cocoon. He was inside the housing working when someone removed the lock-outs and tried to start the engines. turned him into a human Klein bottle. We had to shoot him because there was no way we could every put him back together again. I dream about him sometimes..."

"Holy Shit," Triana said. "At least the Master was only playing a joke on me.

"And still he got you to resume studying magic?"

"Yeah. He was still going on about how if I stay here I'll end up marrying Dean. But I'm not interested in getting married. I can see how it was the biggest mistake my mother ever made. She was unhappy with Dad, thought things would get better if she ran off with the Outsider but it's the same-old same-old. I want to see the world. Go places, do things. I want to be my own person and not someone's ..."wife"! She made air-quote around wife. "But The Master did say one thing that made a lot of sense. Oddly, it was something you had said as well."

"Me?"

"Yeah, remember you once said Hank and Dean are like magnets for bad luck and that if I stayed here I'd all the luck in the world to survive?"

"Ok." Gary didn't recall saying exactly those words, but didn't disagree with the conclusion.

"Anyway, the Master was saying how magic calls to magic and that people who can do magic have to learn how to use magic just to protect themselves from all the other magic users. And I remembered what you'd said and realized that this much of what he was saying was true. Just like Hank and Dean have targets on the backs of their heads just because their father is a Venture, I've got one on my head because my father's a necromancer. So I'd better learn - to see out of the back of my head, or something."

"You gotta do what ya gotta do. I'll miss not seeing you around here."

There was a wistful note to Gary's comment. Triana turned to look him closely in his face. "Are you flirting with me?" she asked unexpected.

Gary felt like he had been pole-axed, and started blushing. "I am?" he protested. "I don't thing I've flirted with anyone in my life. I wouldn't know how to flirt," he stammered.

Triana smiled good-naturedly. "You're doing a pretty good job for someone who doesn't know what he's doing."

I just," Gary tried to explain lamely, "It's nice to have someone around to talk to that near my own age. Who's not Dr. Venture or - the boys - or..." Gary let his words dribble away. It seemed like the more he said that worse he was making it.

"I'll give you my mom's number before I go so you can tell if you hear anything about Kim."

"Sure. Great." Gary wished she hadn't mentioned his ex-girlfriend. It was still a painful subject to him, since Kim, Triana's best friend, had decided that her life's mission was to kill Hank Venture. As long as that remained her goal in life and he remained the Venture's bodyguard they couldn't be together ever again. He shook his head. "I've put notices out in every placed I could think of that she might see, even in Villainous Times, but I haven't heard back anything."

"There's a magazine for super-villains?" Triana was surprised.

"Mostly it's for super-villains groupies, but everyone kind has to keep an eye on it to see who's up or down that week." Gary didn't add that he's seen some of the magazines she father got in the mail. "Modern Necromancy and Voodooism Topics" was every bit as out there as Villainous Times.

"She probably hasn't had time to send a reply," Triana muttered. "You said she was on the run from The Blackhearts?"

"Yeah. After I made my report to OSI HQ that there as a Blackhearts cell in town they sent out a swat team to scour the area. Found an old Convert that looks like they had converted it to their purposes, but the building was empty and had been for a few days. Doesn't mean that Kim escaped but I kind of think the only reason they had to abandon the convert was because Kim was loose again and would rat out the convent as their base."

Triana was nodding her head. "You will let me know if you ever hear from Kim?" she asked.

"Of course. And you'll let me know is she contacts you. 'Cause you..."

"Yeah." Gary stopped walking. They were at the edge to the woods. Phrases like finding a needle in a haystack or missing the tree for the forest flashed through his head. "Say, you don't happen to have a crystal ball with you? One that can could find a walking tree? Now that we're here I have no idea how I'm going to track something that doesn't leave footprints?"

"No, I don't read crystal balls. I'm a sorceress in training, not some flim-flam artist. I can't believe you came out here without a plan!"

"I'm sort of used to ad libbing things."

"Then ad lib something. Didn't you go to Boy Scouts or something?"

"Junior Henchmen - but it was only one summer."

"They have a Junior Henchman Camp?" Triana wondered.

"Well, that's what the Monarch called it after he kidnaped me then discovered that I was underage. That was during my eighth grade class trip to Washington, DC?"

"I thought the Guild of Calamitous Intent had strict rules about recruiting minors."

"They do. Not so much back then but even so after the Monarch discovered he'd captured a bunch of minors he turned our captivity into an impromptu summer camp. Then when he released us he had to paid off all the parents so they wouldn't sue."

"That's just insane," Triana protested. "I guess I should be glad that there are rules for how to deal with underage kids, but... Never mind. Was there anything in your Junior Henchman Camp about how to track your foe?"

"I was fifteen. I was more interested in reading the latest issue of Spiderman then in tracking someone. That took a lot of work. Then again..."

Gary looked back across the open meadow, spotted something, turned to face it then began waving his arms forwards, sideways, up, down. After a moment he turned exactly 180 degrees and looked at the grass under his feet closely. "Ok!" he exclaimed after a time.

"If you're putting on a show to impress me, consider me not impressed." Triana growled sarcastically.

"No, I was trying to figure out where the tree-thing had to have been standing. The security camera's over there. The pond there. It came it in an angle to the pond and if I calculated correctly. It came out of the woods over there and returned here. And see, the grass is disturbed!"

Triana looked where Gary had pointed. "You sure about this?" she asked.

"Of course!. See how the rest of the grass leans downhill? Where it's been dragged by the rains? But here the blades are leaning away from us, as if something had been dragged along there."

Triana looked again. She was beginning to think the only thing disturbed was Gary but decided to keep that observation to herself. She could afford to go on a wild goose chase for a an hour or so before trying to find Dean again.

Gary lead the way across the small glade and into the woods. He slowed up there and looked about constantly for signs of something having moved among the trees and brush. The ground here became rolling with many rocks laying about. Some washed into gullies, others perched on the tops of ridges where the next heavy rain might relocated them downhill somewhere. Finally Gary came to a small hollow where a large sheet of limestone had come to rest on a couple granite boulders forming an overhang maybe five feet high and eight feet back but curving to the left behind the boulders to form a small cave. Even Triana could see that the ground cover was stirred up.

"Hey, Kemosabe, what do the tracks say?" she asked.

"Sshhh. It may be inside."

"Isn't it kind of small for a eight foot tall head of broccoli?" she asked.

Gary turned and silently shook his hands at her as if to say "Shut! Up!"

After listening patently for a couple minutes and hearing nothing, Gary walked closer to the cave. He unslung the wireless TASER, armed it and got it comfortable in one arm, then unclipped a flashlight and held that in his other hand. He bent down to crawl under the overhang and was surprised to find Triana creeping along right behind him. He would have told her to go back if that wouldn't have lead to an argument when he was trying to keep as quiet as a graveyard.

The light was flickering against the back wall of the cave when the heard a rustle.

"Something's in there," Triana breathed on Gary's neck.

"It could just be the raccoon that shows up at the mudhole every night. It's been stealing food out of the trash." Gary whispered back.

"Is that why you send that note to dad?"

"What part of 'shh' don't you understand?" he snapped back.

They crept in a little further. There was only a little area around the dogleg formed by the boulder upholding the shelf of rock above them. From the darkness came faint whimper "ah-ah-ah's"

"That's no raccoon," Triana whispered.

"No shit, sherlock," Gary whispered back, wishing she wasn't crowding him so much. It made it hard for him to maneuver.

"Hey!" she said in a normal voice. "There's no call for that!" Then in a whisper she added, "oh, sorry."

The unseen voice shifted to panicky "oh-oh-oh-oh!"

Gary sighed exasperatingly. "Just step back and give me some room. In case these's trouble." He waited until Triana finally moved, then took a step ahead and flashed the light into the deepest corner of the cave.

"What the heck," he muttered but Triana screamed loud and long into his ear. "Kill it! Kill it! Kill it! It's an abomination. The souls! The souls crying out for peace! Oh, God," and she bolted, hands over her eyes.

Gary didn't watch her running away. His eyes were transfixed on a face that he knew. A face he never expected to see again. A face that was alive when it should very much have been dead.

"Texas?"

Cowering the back of the little cave was a mostly naked, scarred and emaciated man. Someone from out of Gary's past. Someone he never expected to see again.

"Texas?" he repeated. "It's me, 21. Remember? From the Cocoon?"

"Cocoon?" the creature repeated.

There was something wrong with Gary's old fellow henchman. His scalp was Black with kinky hair. A great "Y" ran down from his collar bone to just above his crouch. Coarse and sloppy stitching circled one arm and both legs. One eye was blue, the other brown. The creature - Texas" - wore the tatter remnants of army camo pants and not much else. He looked scratched and scarred and starved half to death. But his (its?) face was unmistakable that of Henchman 127, A.K.A. 'Texas".

"What the hell happened to ya, buddy? Why didn't you make it back to the Cocoon during the recall?"

"Cocoon!" The creature said again, more confidently this time.

"Well, let's get you up to the house and cleaned up and feed. It doesn't look like you've eaten in days." Gary held out his hand friendly-like.

The creature took it and stood up unsteadily. "Food" it crooned. "Food Good."

"You bet it's good," Gary said, and lead the creature into the day. The tree thing was forgotten in Gary's amazement in finding his former colleague still alive after thinking him dead all this time. A hot meal, a hot bath and a night in a real bed and maybe by thing Texas would be able to tell his story. And maybe by them Triana could explain why she ran away screaming.


	5. Chapter 5

"Normally I don't accept as clients people who have stuffed me in a bag," Dr. Billy, M.D. said, refusing to met Gary's eyes.

"I'm pretty sure that wasn't me," Gary replied. The little dwarf was singular enough to be remembered if he had done something like that. Billy Quizmaster was about four feet tall with an enormously enlarged skull. He was missing one eye, which he covered with a patch and one arm which was replaced by a robotic prosthesis of surprising dexterity. He was in his mid-30s and spoke with a pronounced lisp.

Dr Billy appraised him with his one good eye. "Perhaps not," he concluded. "Still there is the matter of your payment. Normally I expect cash. Fifty dollars every other week for the next ten years is..." he let the sentence trail off.

They were talking in a very swank offices in a downtown medical center. In a row above Billy's head were a series of framed degrees from respected universities and licenses from state and federal medical boards. Gary wondered what Billy Quizboy had done to move into such an expensive office since the last he'd heard Billy and his long time companion had been living in a single-wide trailer out near the Venture Compound. The various degrees carried dates spread out over the last eight years but the paper itself looked brand new. Dr. Billy, as he now insisted on being called, was wearing an immaculate white lab coat expertly tailored to fit his somewhat misshapened body.

"That's fifty dollars out of every paycheck I get," Gary argued. "It's as much as I can afford. OSI grunts like myself don't get paid much."

"Or have a long lifespan," Billy countered. "Still the patient is interesting." They looked across the room where Hank and Dean Venture were using a doggie squeak-toy to play "Keep Away" from a shambling, multi-hued individual covered in stitching. "You sure Dr. Venture created this - individual?"

"He admitted it himself. Calls it Venturestein."

"Interesting," Dr. Billy murmured. "This would be the first time Dr, Venture has actually completed a project that worked. To be honest, I did not know he had it in him."

"Well," Billy turned back to his desk and picked up all the papers Gary had filed out about his reanimated friend. "I am curious how Dr, Venture made this work so I will take on the case. And, since your payment plan is next to non-existent I will, on the advise of my financial adviser, do this pro bono."

"Hi there, Peter White, financial planner." The tall, slender man who had been sitting at another desk near Dr, Billy's, leaned over and offered his hand. It was unpleasantly pinkish, as were the eyes of the albino.

"You're trusting your money to this guy?" Gary asked Doctor Billy.

"Peter White is my oldest and most trusted friend." Billy said emphatically.

"But didn't he get you kicked off the quiz-boy circuit?"

"He stuck with me through thick and thin." Billy insisted.

"He's flagged by both the Guild and OSI as unreliable."

"I don't' like the tone of this conversation, Mr. Fuu. I trust Peter implicitly. If you do not like him you are welcome to take your business elsewhere.

"Like theirs is anywhere else to go."

"Then it's settled," Bill said with a smile. "Peter, how does my calender look?"

Peter White picked up a large, leather-bound appointment book and studied it for a moment. "You were scheduled for a heart transplant operation this afternoon but the - uh - patient died overnight."

"Oh, dear. And I liked him, too. Such a great comedian. So I'm guessing my afternoon is now free?"

"Yes. And the best part is we get to keep the money because he paid in advance." White said cheerfully.

"Well, Mr. Fuu," Billy addressed Gary, "If you could bring back Mr - ah - Stein in an hour we'll be ready to run some tests on him. Some of the tests will involve DNA sequencing so I won't have a final report until..." he counted three days on his fingers -" until Thursday. Come back around ten and we'll discuss my findings.

"That's great, doc, really great. Do you think he'll ever recover his memories?"

"We'll see. We'll see."

[]

Texas was on his three bowl of cereal when the boys came in for lunch. Most of the first two bowls were spread out on the floor. Apparently Texas had forgotten how to handle a spoon and had some trouble with hand-eye coordination. "Hey! Venturestein!" the boys cried with a wave at the shambling patchwork man at the table, and carefully walked around the mess on the floor to the refrigerator where they rummage for something to eat. Hank opened a can of Spaghetti-o's into a bowl and microwaved it. Dean prepared a salad. Gary wondered if he was going through a phase or something because he'd noticed that Dean had been favoring meatless meals.

Dean sat down at the table across from Texas, took a bite of his salad then asked, "Venturestein, whatcha been up to?"

The zombiefied henchman looked at Dean blurry-eyed for a moment, thought, long and hard (spoon on cereal hovering uncertainly in the air) before smiling. "De-an, Fri-end" he croaked. "I thought you were off with the army or something?"

"Army - bad. Go home. Cocoon."

"Cocoon?" Hank echoed, sitting down next to his brother. "Is he a friend of yours?" he asked Gary.

"What do you think? This is my old pal, Texas. Yeah we were buds in the Cocoon. He didn't come back from a mission and I figured he was dead. Brockified, as we called it. But your dad brought him back and as soon as we get his memories strengthened out, you'll see. He'll be as good as new!"

Hank looked at Gary like he was some kind of stranger, then looked at his brother and started humming the theme music to "The Twilight Zone."

Gary scowled. "His name is 'Texas,' not Venturestein. Don't confuse him by calling him something he's not," he told the boys. "The first step in dealing with trauma is to establish an environment of normality."

"Whatever."

Gary thought for a moment. "You said he was around here for a while, right." Dean nodded. "Did Triana ever see him back then?"

"Why?"

"She was there when we found him, and ran away screaming. I just wondered if she was like that when he was here before?"

Dean thought for a moment, "No I don't think she ever saw him. She was hanging out a lot at school at the time," Dean said.

"Dr. Orpheus came storming around, though, and had a long conversation with Pop," Hank added. "Boy, was he steamed, and I don't think he was any happier when he left either."

"Are we going to keep him? Dean asked.

"Of course. I just wondered what Triana's problem was." Venturestein had picked up his bowl and was trying to examine its underside. Gary snatched the bowl out of its hands before it had spilled any more milk and cereal. "Texas. ol' buddy. I think it's time for a quick bath then off to see a competent physician.

"Doctor Billy?"

"Bingo."

[]

Gary was in the waiting room three days later when Dr, Billy came out of his surgery leading a famous starlet. her face was swathed in bandages but her boobs were unforgettable. "Keep the bandages one for at least 72 hours," he was telling her. "Ah, that's three days." he added when she started counting hours on her fingers. "And no sun-tanning for a full month. Both natural and artificial. The strong light will only bring out the scars. I'll see you in a week to evaluate your prognosis." Billy handed the woman off to a Publicists, who wrapped the star in a scarf, big floppy hand and a over-sized rain coat before hustling her out the door.

Dr. Billy waved to Gary to come over to his desk. Billy had added a reflecting mirror headband to his costume. He fiddled a little with his after he had climbed into his chair. Steps had been built into one arm to help him reach the seat. The chair was otherwise an ordinary executive seat, deeply padded, upholstered in soft leather. Peter White was at his neighboring desk, apparently playing Portal with the sound off.

Billy pulled a large stack of papers out of his in basket and flipped through a few sheets before saying. "This is been a most interesting case, Mr. Fuu. I'm glad you brought it to me. And sorry about being such a dick about it last time. I should have known that as a former henchman you wouldn't have come to me with some ordinary weirdness. - Say where is Mr - uh - Stein?"

"Texas wandered off last night. I have the boys looking for him."

"Well, I hope they can find him because I would love to do a lot of studying of him." He paused. "You're not worried about Hank and Dean getting lost?"

"They've got their wrist communicators. It has built-in GPS. What about Texas?"

"Yes - umm. Mr. Stein - Texas - seems to be composed of organ parts from at least seven different donors. Possibly more since I only took random samples from a limited number of locations. Normally tissues from such diverse sources will conflict, creating an auto-immune infection that kills the host. Dr. Venture seems to have overcome that problem by soaking all the different tissues in some kind of stem cell bath before crudely sewing the body parts together with -ah - sewing thread. "

"Something wrong about that?"

"A real doctor would have used a surgical thread that dissolves after a while," Billy observed contemptuously. "Mr Stein will have sewing thread all through his body for years to come. I don't anticipate major problems with that. But he may have to come in from time to time to have loose threads removed."

"Anyway - " Billy turned a couple more pages. "You understand about stem cells, right?" Gary shook his head. "Ok, then. "The body grows from a single fertilized egg, right? The egg divides and divides and divides some more. Eventually the colony of cells has to start becoming the different kinds of tissues we have in our body - skin, muscle, nerve, bone, organ, etc. So hormones flood into the blastocyte triggering changes into the cells. These become the stem cells. In time as they grow and are exposed to various chemicals they turn into specific cells and organs but at this early stage they are very - ah - plastic. Dr. Billy paused to see if Gary was following.

"So what Dr. Venture seems to have done is use this strain of stem cells like a kind of plaster holding the different organs together, growing the missing parts where needed, growing new nerves to replace the damaged ones and applying an overall friend-or-foe identification system so the body doesn't tear itself apart through auto0immune disorders. This is really advanced stuff, and frankly if Dr. Venture were to make this available to the medical world he'd make that fortune he's always dreamed about."

Gary nodded in agreement but wondered where the lackadaisical Dr. Venture could have come up with something like that. He suspected this was some kind of modification of Jonas Venture, Senior's cloning technology, which was strictly prohibited by law. He probably couldn't reveal the source of the stem cells without revealing that he was involved in illegal technologies.

"What about Texas?" Gary asked. "Is he healthy?"

"His liver and kidney functions are excellent. Blood chemistries also come back fine. Maybe a little high in the bad LDC but nothing that's going to kill him. His shambling movements and bad posture largely come about from mismatched body parts and a general weakness in some of the regrown nerve tissues. Several years of intense physical therapy could fix that but as neither of us can afford that and he's doing well enough as it is, we'll leave it alone.

"And his brain?"

Billy frowned. "There's not much hope there. The brain is a very delicate organ, very susceptible to damage from oxygen deprivation. Parts of his brain has simply necrophiled. They're just not there. A lot of the missing brain tissue has been replaced by stem cells, which as new cells simple don't have any of your friend's memories. I would have to say that effectively he is a new person. There might be some residual memories in his deeper cortical knots but there's nothing I can do with restore his memories. There's nothing to restore."

A glum Gary thanked Billy and promised to bring in Venturestein in a month so he could run some further tests.

On the drive back the Venture Compound Gary passed a little store that specialized in educational supplied. He turned around, pulled into the store. He found several sets of flashcards there - numbers, shapes, objects. For the sake of his old friend he felt he had to do what he could to improve the creatures mind.


	6. Chapter 6

"Status Report, Number Two?" the Monarch commanded in his squeaky voice.

"The surprise birthday party for number 85 is still on schedule for 8:30," Dr. Mrs The Monarch read from a clipboard in a disturbingly deep voice. "Reports are that he still hasn't a clue. Also tonight's Movie Night feature will be "Sixteen Candles" starring Molly Ringwald and..."

"Not that kind of report!" the Monarch interrupted. "What's the status on the Cocoon? Is it ready for our next assault on the loathsome Dr. Venture?"

"No."

"No? What kind of an answer is that?" The Monarch demanded exasperatingly.

"It's concise and succinct," Dr. Mrs. the Monarch replied. "We're not combat-ready and won't be for two to six weeks."

"Two to six weeks? What are you doing, ordering parts off of Ebay?"

"We're using Craigslist these days."

"Why aren't we ready?" The Monarch clenched his hands against his head and kneaded his forehead.

"The last time we had to make repairs to the cocoon's engines we stole the parts from Sgt. Hatred's Hover Tank."

"I recall," the Monarch said. "He was on the verge of cutting my balls off because of that. Not our finest hour..."

"Unfortunately since Sgt. Hatred made up with his wife, Princess Tinyfeet the two of them have disappeared. Along with their Hover Tank."

"It's there someone else we can steal - borrow some parts from? What about Mr. Impossible?"

"Ducted turbo fan" for his flying car."

"Captain Sunshine?"

"Natural power of flight."

"Oh, right. What about - gah! - Dr. Venture. Surely he has some anti-grav stuff floating about. His father was always inventing stuff like that."

"Not a trace of anything "

"The X-1?"

"Plasma exhaust from its nuclear reactor."

"Rats!"

"There is the Rhodan Liberation Front in Japan that is using anti-grav generators to get their biological Rhodan monstrosity into the air. But it would take us as long to get over there, infiltrate their group and take the parts as it would be to wait for them to come via Craigslist."

"You've got to be shitting me!" The Monarch growled. "What about the Monarchmobile? Is it operational or in the middle of its." his voice turned snarky, "million mile overhaul?"

"Operational, sweety."

"Good. Then tonight we'll load it up with henchmen and HAVE MY REVENGE ON DR. VENTURE!"

"Not tonight, dear. The boys have been rather anxious to see tonight's movie."

"A movie!" The monarch screeched. "They would rather see Sixteen Candles than share in my revenge against Doctor Venture?" He leaped to his feet, shaking his fist at the ceiling. "What kind of minions do you call yourselves? Are you men or dog-faced, dress-wearing sissy-boys!" Panting heavily the Monarch fell back into his throne. Just in time to hear a falsetto voice call out, "You go girl!"

"I heard that!" the Monarch shouted, leaping out of his throne and clattering down the steps to the floor of the control room. "Who dares mock The Monarch?" he demanded. He swirled to face one of the henchmen sitting at a console. "Was it you?" he accused.

"No sir," the minion answered in an artificially deep voice. "I was monitoring the - uh - controls," he continued, hoping that the Monarch wouldn't notice the game of pong running in a small window on his monitor.

"Then it must have been you!" the Monarch pointed to another of the operators at the controls.

"No - " he squeaked before instantly lower his voice to a bass, "no, sir.. I was attending to my duties..."

"I know one of you was mocking and I won't rest until I find out who!" He continued pacing around the control room. Dr. Mrs the Monarch sighed and reached into a pocket built into her throne and brought out a file. Pulling off her gloves she started shaping and polishing her nails. It was going to be a long evening.

[]

"This sucks," Gary grumbled, squatting behind a large bush just inside the edges of the woods on the Venture's Compound. Hank Venture had come to him that afternoon to tell him of seeing Venturestein - his old buddy, Texas, rather - sneak into the Residence last night and steal some food out of the refrigerator. Hank had followed him to the edge of the woods at the back of the Compound. When Venturestein had gone on into the woods Hank decided he's seen enough and went back to whatever it was he was doing in the living room at 3 o'clock in the morning. Probably trying to watch porn on the scrambled skinamax channel.

So Texas was taking some food out into the woods. He was probably eating it there on the spot. You spend enough time in the wild, living from hand to mouth like he did and you just keep doing it that way because you don't remember that there was any other way of doing things. Still. the food could be for that so-called 8 foot tall walking tree he had been looking for when he'd stumbled over Texas. He had kind of forgotten about the ambulatory head of broccoli in the excitement of finding his old buddy from the Cocoon. He should have continued his surveillance even after finding Texas. Brock Sampson would have, and Gary tried to live his life according to what Brock Sampson would do.

He shifted off his heels for a moment balancing with his knees pressed to the cool, damp ground. He'd have ground-in dirt stains by morning, he thought, as if the needs of the laundry was more important than the needs of bodyguarding the Ventures.

He heard an irregular sounding shuffle, and sat up. In the faint star-light he could see Texas coming this way. He was holding something in his right hand while his left swung freely. OK, so Hank were right, Texas was bringing food out to the woods. He got back on his feet ready to follow after the zombiefied henchman as soon as he passed when unexpected his wrist communicator buzzed. He had it set to silent vibration though in the overwhelming silence of the night the vibrations on his skin sounded as loud as a bugle call.

The display showed he had a text message. He adjusted the controls to display the message. It was from his automated security grid. Something had just crossed over the fence onto the Venture grounds no more than two hundred yards away. Gary watched Texas stalk past him as he debated which was the more important security mission. While he really wanted to know - to prove - that Texas wasn't doing anything suspicious, that was something that would wait for another night. No one climbing over a fence in the middle of the night was ever up to any good. He would have to put a stop to whatever they were doing.

Standing up, he moved silently around the edge of the woods towards the spot the security system had indicated.

[]

"You had to be playing Pong at the time, didn't you!" number 63 complained.

"You were the one yelling out "You Go, Girl!" 71 objected.

"It wasn't me. I just have a guilty-looking face. I spent half my time in high school in detention because the teachers all thought I looked guilty." 63 was a lightly-built medium tall man who'd been trying to grow a moustache for as long as 71 could remember. Which, admittedly, was not that long, but then how long does it take to grow out a moustache.

"Thanks to you we don't get to go to 85's birthday party or see the movie. I was so looking forward to seeing Molly Ringwald's panties."

"Yeah. heh, heh, heh. I liked the bit where she got groped by her grandmother," 63 reminisced.

"I got groped by my grandmother once. It wasn't funny."

63 looked at his partner. "Dude, didn't she know you were a guy?"

"Oh, she knew. She just thought I was getting fat. ... with little girly boobs." 71 grumbled. "God, that was embarrassing. Cut her brake-line later." He chuckled at the memory "That taught the old hag to make fun of me!" 63 came over with a small map of the compound. He had his finger marking the spot where they had just crossed over the fence. "Are we really going to soap the Venture's windows?"

"I thought the Monarch said we were supposed to take a dump in their swimming pool?"

"I'd rather soap their windows. I'm not good at crapping on command."

"Sh-h-h-h. I think I hear someone coming. Let's split up. You head over that way. I'll play goat here in the open."

[]

Gary moved slowly through the dark. The moon was in its New Phase and shed little light. Still it only only a couple minutes for him to get to the fence breach. He was able to make out the sight of a man wearing large, cumbersome butterfly wings. He was peering as cautiously towards the main complex of building as Gary was at him.

When he had got within forty feet of the interloper Gary muttered, "Let's do this," and stood up. There was a snick as he pressed the releases that sent the knives strapped to his forearm into position projecting over his hands. "Don't move if you know what good for us!" he shouted as he strode from behind some bushes to confront the man.

"No, _you_ don't move," a voice commanded from Gary's right. He cast a quick glance in that direction and saw a second minion of the Monarch's step out of the shadows. He had his dart-gun armed and aimed directly at Gary's torso. Damn! How could have have made such a rookie mistake as thinking that the Monarch hadn't sent in his spies in pairs.

"Drop your weapons," the man continued.

Gary considered his odds. The darts were laced with knock-out chemicals. Adrenalin would counter that for a few seconds. But could he kill these two men before he passed out? With an angry groan Gary pressed the button that retracted his knives then held up his hands. Unless the henchmen was one old enough to remember him as "General 21" there was a good chance that they didn't know about the knife/claw apparatus he wore.

"Tie him up. 63," the man with the dart-gun commanded. "Looks like we have a little present for The Monarch. That traitor he's always going on about."

"Shoot him first," 63 said. "I'd rather deal with an unconscious 21. The old-timers... they're scared as hell about him."

"This tub of goo? I'd rather save the darts. And anyway he's not going anywhere."

"But-"

"Just do it!"

63 picked up a length of rope from out of his backpack and started across the open ground towards Gary. Gary was estimating how long it would take to drop his arms, extend his knifes, gut 63, grab his body and using it as a shield against the tranquilizer darts from the other minion.

He was still thinking when someone else lurched out of the woods.

"Butterflies!" Venturestein croaked. "Friend!" He threw himself on the man with the dart-gun, giving him a great, awkward bear-hug. "Go cocoon! home!"

"Oh, my god!" the man with the gun cried, trying to point his dart-gun at the patchwork man but the gun was already wedged between the two. He dropped the gun to get both arms in front of him to push Venturestein away, then sprinted towards the backpack that 63 had left on the ground.

After a stunned second, Gary threw down his arms, released the knives and leaps on 63. "21, please!" the man cried but one knife was already lodged in his heart. Gary yanked his knife out and turned towards the other henchman. He had pulled out a signal gun from the pack and was aiming it with very shaky hands at the lumbering zombie. His finger convulsed on the trigger, but he had forgot to release the safety. The gun didn't fire.

He had also forgotten Gary who was there a moment later swinging his knived hand in a great roundhouse blow. The henchman saw it coming and ducked under it, then started racing towards the woods. Gary followed with Venturestein brining up the rear, still calling out "Friend" "Cocoon."

Just within the first rows of trees the henchmen paused to take off the safety on his gun. A loud _psst! _erupted as the rocket-launched flare sprang from the gun. He was still aiming at Venturestein, but missed. The flare arced across the grass before slamming into the side of one of the manufacturing building and exploding in a shower of sparks. The man turned and raced farther into the gloomy woods.

Gary trudged on after him.

After a couple minutes the henchman was thoroughly lost, but his panic at seeing the mismatched and sewn together body of Venturestein had dissipated. It was obviously alive, he reasoned, and if it was alive, then it would definitely burn if hit with the second signal flare loaded in his gun. He was considering laying a trap for the other guy, the former henchman that the Monarch was always raving about. He had a knife stuck in his boot. In the dark he could easily catch the big guy unawares.

He was crouching behind some bushes when a voice asked, "are you plant-food?"

He spun around, knife in hand, heart in throat.

There was no one visible.

"Who's there?" he croaked.

"Just us trees," the voice replied. There was an odd quality to the voice, it sounded like one of those old arcade computer games, thin, artificial. Like that old guy in the wheelchair, the scientist.

"Don't move!" the henchman ordered. "I've got a gun!"

"Oh, we can't have that!" the voice said. "You could start a fire with one of those. We plant people don't like fires."

One of the dark shadows suddenly moved forward. It looked like a tree with a smooth trunk, maybe eight feet tall. The trunk suddenly bent over and the a large, palm-leaf like appendage reached out and dragged the signal gun from the henchman.

"There. Isn't that better. Now we're all armless. Get it? Armless? Because you don't have a gun and I don't have any arms?" the tree rustled its leaves.

The henchman didn't wait to hear more. He bolted back the way he came, running wildly in the dark, bouncing off unseen trees as he tried to escape from the woods.

And ended up running straight into Gary arms. His knife, actually. The henchman collapsed with a last gasp of breath. "The tree," he gasp, "talked!"

[]

Cleaning up after a hit was always the hardest. During the fighting you're running on adrenaline. Things fly by so fast you barely have time to react. And of course since its life or death you're totally focused on staying alive. But once all that's over... There's the bodies to pick up, blood to swab away, broken doors or windows to board up and all of that to be done while while suffering the reaction-fatigue post-combat.

Gary let the hanchmen who had run to his own death slip to the ground while he crouched, ready for another attack, for who he wasn't sure. When it was evident that nothing more was going to happen, Gary reached down the the corpse and slung it over his shoulder and made his way back to the edge of the woods and the security fence where he had left Texas and the other dead henchman. The dying words of the henchmen, about a tree that talked were stuffed into memory to be mulled over later. He had too many things right now to worry about. Though he wished he had had time to asked the dead man just what he meant by the tree talking.

Texas was bent over the other henchman, 63, shaking him, as if trying to wake up a sleeping man. He looked up when he heard Gary's approach. "Him hurt," Texas said. "Bad heart. Need new one. Get one from doctor-fella."

Gary had stuck him in the heart when they had fought. He supposed that a heart cut in half by an eight inch knife blade might be described as 'bad.' But where do you find a spare heart in this vicinity? Then Gary realized that the corpse he was carrying had a good heart. He had been gored in the stomach and bleed out there. One good heart, one good body made for one new Venturestein. Maybe one that hadn't suffered as much brain damage as Texas. But while Gary didn't believe in Heaven he certainly believed in hell, and bringing 63 back to life would be the very definition of hell.

"No, he said. "The dead deserve to stay dead."

"Venturestein dead," the patchwork creature disputed.

"Only a little," Gary replied. "These guys are all the way dead. Pick him up and carrying him to the X-13's garage."

"Go Cocoon?" Texas asked eagerly. That was where Gary was going but he didn't like the eager tone in Texas's voice. Besides he was pretty sure that the instant the Monarch saw Venturestein he'd destroy it. As much as Gary didn't think creating living creatures from the odds and news of dead henchmen was right, moral or ethical, he also felt that once living, such creatures had as much to continue living as anyone else.

He dropped his body to the floor of the X-13's garage as he looked around for a tarp to spread around on the back seat, then loaded the two bodies inside. It would have been easier to drop them into the truck of the car but it had a nuclear reactor there.

He paused to give Venturestein a looking over. "Are you alright?" he asked. "Did you get hurt?"

The creature shrugged. "Venturestein don't feel much."

The tactile nervous system was one of the things Dr. Venture had not been able to re-connect when he had resurrected Venturestein. The creature could feel enough to pick up and hold things without crushing them but wouldn't feel someone tapping on the back. Since he hadn't see blood dripping anywhere he had to assume that his old buddy, Texas was OK. "Go up to the house," he said. "Go to bed. We'll talk about this tomorrow."

"Go see friend."

"These were never your friends."

Venturestein waved a dismissive hand. "Friend."

"Go to bed. I don't like people wandering around in the middle of the night." Without another word the monster turned and walked out of the garage. Gary got into the driver's seat and turned on the car, waiting 30 seconds for the steam to get up to operational levels. Backing out of the garage, he set off for where he'd last located the Cocoon. He was going to leave a little present on the Monarch's doorstep, and of course, force the Monarch to be responsible for the burial of his two henchmen. The alternative was to call up the police and explain that these were a couple of John Does who had crossed over into the Venture grounds and got killed messing with stuff there. And having the county pick up the tab for burying the guys. Besides the need to bribe the cops to buy such an improbably story, Gary preferred sticking the bill on the Monarch. They were his men, they died on his business. He should be the one to bury them.

[]

The Monarch was sitting at the head of the large break-room, a plate of chocolate cake in his hand. 85 was sitting off to the side being feted by the other minions. The cake was good but the Monarch was still counting the seconds before he could escape from this birthday party. He had schemes to scheme, plans to lay out, not celebrate some annoying minions ability to survive another year.

He looked up in annoyance as one of the minions from the control room entered the room and worked his way through to the crowd towards him. The Monarch disdained personal communicators, whether pagers, cell phones, blackberries or wrist-bands.

The minion came on and whispered in his ear.

"What do you mean, I have a package delivery? Just go out and get it."

The minion bent over and whispered again in the Monarch's ear.

"So you got the package? Why bother coming to me. Can't you see I'm in the middle of something."

The man bent over a third time.

"63 and 71!" Why didn't you just say that in the first place. "Blast that 21! Come my queen," he directed to Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, who was sitting neat him. "We have a funeral to prepare for."

"Who's?" she asked.

"I'd love to say 21's but I'm afraid it two of our men. And he just left them on our doorstep for us to deal with!"

The crowd parted as the Monarch swept from the room, followed by his wife. As they left the room conversation started up but it was hushed, subdued. The celebration of 85's luck had turned into a wake for the lack of same for two of their fellows.


	7. Chapter 7

It was going on to four AM when Gary got back from dropping off the dead henchmen, checked that the fence where they had come over wasn't cut, checked on the integrity of the alarm system and did a walk-though of all the building to make sure that no one else had sneaked onto the grounds and were waiting for him to let done his guard. He plopped down on the recliner he had claimed as a bed and was asleep without bothering to kick off his boots.

The sun arrived, on schedule at 7:00 am. Gary squinted into the too-bright room and tried to roll over. Not easy when sleeping on a recliner. But it was no good. With the sun up, with him awake, the inevitable thought filled his head: "What would Brock Sampson do?"

Well, obviously, he get up, do a hundred push-up - singled handed - run for 5 miles and get on with the rest of his life. Nothing he know about his idol ever suggested that Brock got tired, or tried to sleep in just because he had been up all night. Gary rolled off the recliner, went into the tiny restroom to splash cold water on his face, tighten his boots and set off jogging. A henchman's life was never easy.

Noon.

Gary opened the box on the table in his guard shack and dropped the softball they had been playing with that morning in it. He pawed through its contents trying to decide what he and Texas should play at during the afternoon. The basketball? A Frisbee? The hackysack was still too early for Texas. The reanimated henchman could barely stand on his two feet. Balancing on one and kicking with the other... Just not going to happen. He had been playing catch with Texas this morning, well, maybe something closer to Fetch. Venturestein wasn't very good at catching the softball no matter how softly or directly at him Gary pitched it. Maybe he should switch to the flash cards for the afternoon. Work on stimulating the brain a bit. While thinking about that, Gary opened a drawer under the countertop, took out a bowl of instant Raman noodles. He filled it with water from the restroom and popped it into the microwave. As it cooked he considered which sets of flashcards to use.

He was determined to rehabilitated his zombiefied former comrade, even if it took the rest of his life. Saving Texas was a project that diverted his thought from his former girlfriend. Or was she "former?" True she was determined to hench Hank Venture, and was on the run from the Blackheart assassins and from the OSI. But just because of that didn't mean that he didn't love her any less. And he assumed she continued to love him - as long as he didn't get between her and her hench.

The microwave dinged. As Gary turned to open the microwave door he saw the ghost of his dead friend, 24 standing near by, looking ignored. "Look, I'd help you, too, if there any way to help you," Gary said. "You know I tried to get Dr. Venture to clone you. And when he said the best he could do was create an infant age clone I was willing to do that, to adopt you as my son and raise you as my own."

The ghost of 24 turned away and walked across the room. It was a small guard shack so he didn't have far to walk.

"Come on, don't be like that!:Gary complained. "It's not my fault that Dr. Venture refused to accept what I offered to pay for the operation. That was a family heirloom. Marvel Tales #1 - in mint! It was worth a full half million dollars.! I could have sold that at any time and lived like a king. Only I would never have parted with that. But I was willing to do that for you!"

The nostrils of the ghost of 24 flared as if he exhaled in disgust. Then he disappeared.

"Oh, come on!" Gary pleaded but 24 would no reappear. "Be that way," he snarled then went to get his lunch out of the microwave.

He pulled off the cover, releasing a cloud of steam, and sat it on the counter to cool down, then went back to his box of goodies. He'd searched the Internet for studies on treating brain injuries. There were a lot of reports but little consensus on what was the best approach. So he had decided on a mix of physical training to improve Texas's coordination and mental training with the flash cards to awaken his mind.

Gary picked on the shapes set and laid it on the counter then quickly started slurping up the noodles. He checked the time. He had asked Hank and Dean to keep an eye on Texas while he was gone but they didn't seem excited by the prospect. He wasn't sure what was the matter. They had seemed excited enough when they first meet him, like finding an old, lost friend, which was how Gary felt as well. But they seemed to have cool to the creature Gary considered and dismissed as quickly the possibility that he was spending too much time with Texas. That maybe the boys resented him for that. But Texas needed him. Surely the boys could see that. They'd just have to learn to accept that.

He threw the empty Styrofoam bowl in the trash and was picking up the flash card when his wrist two-way chimed. Dr. Venture's name came up on the display. "Yeah, boss?" Gary answered.

"21 I need -"

"It's 'Gary,' boss. 21 is part of another life."

"Gary - 21? What does it matter, it's still you. Come over here I need the help of some of your special skills." He cut off the call before Gary had time to ask any questions.

Gary cursed. He left the cards on the counter, checked his appearance in the bathroom mirror and hurried out.

He stopped at the hanger for the X-1 to tell Hank and Dean that he would be a while getting back to them, then headed to the Venture residence. He expected to find Dr. Venture lounging in the living room, something he often did, but the scientist wasn't there. Nor was he upstairs, or in the panic room or any of the usual labs. Gary was about to give up and call the doctor for directions but that, it seemed to him, was admitting defeat. How hard could it be to find one hunch-back, lazy super-scientist? But as he raised his communicator to make the connection he remembered one place he hadn't looked.

He took the stairs into the basement, then opened the concealed door into the sub-basement and descended another set of stairs. From a window in the door at the base of the stairs lights shone. Gary smiled. Once again he had found the evasive Dr. Venture.

Gary pushed through the doors at the bottom of the stairs into a vast room, dimly lit except for the spot at the foot of the stairs where Dr. Venture had set up some kind of work station. There was a large, long, low machine the size of a refrigerator, set up on a rolling table. Next to it was another smaller table filled with scattered piles of paper, plus a computer hooked to the large machine. It displayed a confusing series of panels filled with numbers, graphs and digital meters. Dr. Venture was sitting on a a stool in front of the monitor as Gary came through the door. "Took you long enough," he snapped.

Beyond the lighted area was large room, dimly lit by a few emergency lights mounted over exits. The room was filled with row upon row of odd machines, man-sized tanks mounted on waist high consoles. All the tanks were empty. Some was broken as well. Elsewhere there was scorching on the consoles. This was where Dr. Venture had operated his secret, illegal clone factory, maintaining an army of Hanks and Deans so he could replace them, as he had so often, if they died.

"Someone didn't bother to tell me where they were!" Gary snapped back. Though he was assigned to protect the super-scientist, Gary found that the man just rubbed him the wrong way and it was hard to maintain a civil attitude around him. He pointed to the large machine. "What's that? Oh, by the way you're not supposed to be down here."

"Like hell! This is my house and I can go anywhere I damn well please!" the doctor snapped back.

"Not according to the consent agreement you signed with OSI," he reminded him. Gary walked around close to the big machine. He noticed it had a shelf running all along it's length filled with dozens of small bottles, and a few not so small jugs, each carefully labeled with what looked like cryptic chemical formulas. capillary tubes ran from the various bottles into the machine. On the floor were several large carboys where waste fluids drained into.

"That's just a piece of paper. Doesn't mean anything."

"Not according to Col. Gathers, the new director of OSI. He took me aside personally to brief me on this matter. The agreement says you're to seal off this area, not make any repairs to the cloning equipment or sell, license or transfer any of this technology to any other person. Part of my assignment here was to make a monthly inspection to see that you were living up to your agreement." After a moment he turned back to the scientist and said "I know about what's going on in the back room."

Dr. Venture paled. "You're not going to tell Colonel Gather's are you?"

"That you're rebuilding a couple of clone-tanks? I wanted to talk to you first."

"And so the blackmailing begin!"

"Hardly. You couldn't afford the kind of blackmail this calls for." He circled the big machine, came back to the front. He reached for a dial on the console only to have his hand slapped by the scientist.

"Don't touch things you don't understand," Venture snapped. "For all you know that could have been the self-destruct command.

"Who puts an self-destruct device in a commercial piece of hardware? What is this thing?" Gary asked again.

"It's an automated DNA sequencer."

"Does it have anything to do with cloning the boys?"

"No."

"So why's it down here?"

"I - I didn't want the boys to see it. The first thing they's do is ask a lot of questions. Questions I don't want to answer!"

"Like about them being clones."

"They never let things go," Dr. Venture went on, ignoring Gary. "You show them a DNA sequencer and the first thing they want is to have their DNA sequenced."

Gary picked up the top sheet from one of the piles of paper on the sidetable. "Dean Venture" he read, "and dated this month. So you've already sequenced their DNA. Why not let them see?"

"Because then they'd want to run my DNA."

"So? You are their father, so your DNA would look like theirs, right?"

"Not quite." Gary looked at him quizzically, put the sheet down and picked up the top sheet from another pile. It had Hanks name on it and a date a week later. Dr. Venture looked ready to slap hands again. Instead he said, "Look, to clone the boys it was necessary to place certain markers into their DNA. It kind of shows up noticeably when you look at a DNA sequence - if you know what you're looking for."

"Would the boys know what to look for?"

"No but they don't have to since the markers are non-amino acid compounds. Even with their education they're know that those compounds aren't supposed to be in DNA. And they'll keep asking and asking, picking at the scab until they pull it open."

"And this has nothing to do with cloning them?"

"I told you, no it doesn't. So look, are you going to Col Gathers about the - the backroom? I can write you a very nice check if that will help you make up your mind."

"Boss, your checks bounce all the time. If I wanted blackmail I'd want it in negotiable commodities. Blood diamond, maybe a couple tons of molybdenum. But I'm not trying to blackmail out. I feel conflicted about all this," he said, turning away so the scientist wouldn't see his face. "Part of the unwritten code of the Henchman is to not snitch, unless your life is on the line, in which case babbling is to be expected. But it's more than that. I'm here to protect the boys, and to a lesser extent, you. For most of their lives you have been the worst possible father in the world." Gary shook his head in disdain. "But you're also their only father. I don't think it serves them any good to send you away to some OSI Black Site. to be never seen again."

"So you're not going to report me?"

"Not for now. But you can't keep working on those machines in the back room."

"I can't do that. The boys need them. You know what they're like, their death-prone. If I don't have a pair of back-ups they'll end up dead and all my work for nineteen years, all the damnation I'm committed, will be for nothing."

Gary turned back to face the scientist. His face was stern and implacable. "No more cloning. Period. Got it?"

"But..."

"Wait a minute," Gary interrupted. "When I asked you to clone my friend 24, you said the clones could only grew at a natural rate so the best you could do was produce an infant 24. The boys are 19. You don't have any 19 year old grubs. How were you going to back-up the boys when all you have are babies?"

Dr. Venture began sputtering, throwing out half sentence explanations.

A thought came to Gary and suddenly his blood began to boil. "You've figured out how to accelerate the grubs growth? Thought you said that only caused it to turn all cancerous?" Gary had had a long lecture on why cloning was illegal technology before coming to the Venture Compound. Cloning itself was bad enough when people could arrange to stay alive for ever, but the real fear had been the possibility of a super-villain uncorking a clone army after only a few weeks or months time. As long as a clone took twenty years to develop that wasn't a serious problem for world domination, but continued research into cloning, it was feared, would eventually solve that problem and that wasn't good.

"There have been a lot of advancing to biochemistry since my father's day. We've learned a lot about how the cell ages and what causes them to turn cancerous. It wasn't hard to figure out that if I applied a growth accelerator for a month than discontinued it for two the cells would advance but still have time to knit into the communities of cells in the body and not turn into cancer. I'll have the grubs caught up with the boys in three, four years. Five tops."

Gary closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at the loathsome little man. He had been given authorization to kill Dr. Venture if he ever got into the position where he could destroy the world. This so sounded like just such a situation. His chest rose and fell in great stentorian breaths and he prepared to launch himself at the scientist and twist his diseased brain from his body. But then a thought occurred that calmed him. Dr. Venture was many things, vain, treacherous, self-absorbed but most of all lazy. He was one of the few people who could invent a way to literally take over the world and only think of it as a crutch for his boys. This secret was probably safe for now. He let out his breath slowly, forcing his rigid muscles to relax.

As he struggled to regain control, it came to him that his reaction had been all too extreme, since he basically didn't care if the world was destroyed or not. He wasn't and never would be a model citizen. He wasn't some globe-saving hero like Captain Sunshine. He was a henchman. All he cared was whether he would survive. This had to have been some kind of post-hypnotic command implanted in him while training at OSI. Usually a post-hypnotic murder command doesn't work because people only do things that they normally would do. But as a henchman he was used to killing people so such a post-hypnotic command would work on him. Gary discovered that he really didn't like the idea that OSI was trying to program him without his permission. Since quitting the Monarch he had savored his freedom. Sure he still thought of himself as a henchman. Some habits are so deeply engrained that it would be years before he stopped thinking that way. But he liked being his own henchman, not someone else's. He struggled with his conditioning and after a moment he was able to straighten up and ask in a calm voice that showed none of the emotion he'd felt a moment before, "so what did you want to see me about?"


	8. Chapter 8

Dr. Venture, unaware that he had faced immanent death just seconds before. said "I need a sample of my father's DNA."

"No problem. I've seen the grave marker out back. I'll just get a shovel. I should have him exhumed by mid-afternoon."

"Uh-h-h-h" Dr. Venture said uncertainly.

"What? Is he radioactive? Poisonous? Carrying some infectious disease? Maybe a little zombieism? No problem we'll work something out."

"He's not there," Dr. Venture finally got out.

"Oh, secret burial! Good idea. Some of these Arches are pretty nuts when it comes to getting revenge on their Nemesises. Never know when one might decide he has to desecrate the corpse. So tell me where he is, and I still should have a tissue sample before supper."

"There is no body."

"Oh." Gary paused to think about that. "That is a complication."

"If I'd needed a body dug up I could have just have the boys do it."

"Isn't that something kind of gross to have the boys do, digging up their own grandfather?"

"It's not half as bad as some of the things my father made me do when he was alive." Dr. Venture said. "His dying was one of the best days of my life. Finally I was free from all his controlling ways. Of course, even in death he screwed me over," the doctor ended with a sigh. After a moment he continued. "All the OSI ever told me was that he was dead, and that there was no body. They'd bury any empty coffin for appearances sake but beyond that he was gone for good. I tried to find out what had really happened but no one was willing to tell me."

"You want me to use my contacts within OSI to find out?" Gary asked.

"Nah. I asked Brock Sampson to look into it years ago and he couldn't turn up anything, and no offense intended, but he had way better contacts inside of OSI than you have."

"No offense taken. So what 'special talents' did you expect from me? I'm not a magician, I can't make things appear out of thin air."

"That's more Dr. Orpheus' line of work! eh eh." Dr. Venture chuckled. "As it happens, long before he died, my father left a lock of his hair at the Museum of Coiffure Culture in New York City."

"Is that some kind of beauty salon."

"Close, it's a museum for hair dressers. Anyway, back in the 80s it made a big deal about collecting locks of hair from all sorts of famous people, Elizabeth Taylor, Fabio, Henry Kissenger, and for some reason, my dad. I was there when they had a big ceremony about his making the donation. Some fruit made a production about cutting off the lock and it was placed inside a display case in the museum. It's still there today."

"And you want me to steal it back?" Gary asked.

"Exactly. I'll only need a few strands. They won't even notice the difference. But it's something I figure you, as a former henchman, would know how to do."

"I'll have to case the place out." Gary pointed out.

"The place is just a ratty old tourist trap. I doubt that they have anything in the way of real security."

"Stll, if we're going to do this right, you're going to let me run the show." Gary insisted.

"Fine, whatever. Get the X-1 warmed up and we'll fly out right after lunch. I figure we can get the hair and be back by bedtime."

"Overnight."

"What?"

"I said overnight. Today we scope out the museum, see what kind of security it has, what kind of supplies we'll need then tomorrow we make the heist."

"Can't we do it all today? Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent a hotel room for one night in New York?"

"It's got to be less then the cost of running the X-1 up there." Gary suggested.

"Oh, please. The X-1 is atomic. All it's power comes from its reactor, and that sucker will be going strong decades from now. The X-1 is the cheapest way to travel. It's already been paid for."

"Overnight, boss. Minimum stay." Gary insisted. "Also make that reservation for three. Texas is coming with us."

"Are you nuts? he'll stick out like a sore thumb. I assumed we'd be doing this incognito."

"If we don't take him he's liable to wander off." Gary argued.

"That would be the best thing that could happen to us."

"No way! You can't abandon him just like that. You made him. You owe it to him to take care of him!"

"I don't owe him squat. I sold him to General Manhower. He should never have run away from the general. But he did and now he's on his own."

"But"

"He's not going and that's final. I'll compromise on the over night stay but that's as far as I'm going. Besides we'll only be gone 24 hours. How much trouble can he - or the boys - get into in that time?"

Gary thought about it for a moment. It would be easier if he didn't have to worry about Texas as well as Dr. Venture. And it might do the boys some good to be responsible for something for a short while. Give them some experience. "Ok, he conceded. "Met at the hanger in an hour?"

"One hour, sure," the doctor agreed absent-mindedly.

Gary started for the stairs, but at the door he paused and turned back to the doctor. "Hey, boss, normally I never asked why the Monarch wanted me do the things he did. It wasn't for a hanchman to question an Arch's plan but I'm not a henchman anymore so I can ask questions, like: why do you need a sample of your father's DNA?"

The scientist put down the clipboard he had just picked up, fidgeted and finally sad, "Something you said a while back has been gnawing at me."

"What?" Gary asked.

"You know, that thing."

"What thing?"

"You're going to make me say it, aren't you!"

"I'm not trying to make you say anything. I don't recall saying anything to you remotely interesting."

"It was about my father. There! Are you happy?"

Gary could see that Dr. Venture was very embarrassed about something but nothing suggested itself as the cause of his embarrassment. Then he had a glimmer of recollection. "Was it about your father banging all those women?"

"Yes, yes, yes." Venture agreed angrily. "And never got one of them pregnant! Never! While ever single time I've had sex with a woman they got pregnant!"

"So you're no longer claiming to have had sex with Dr. Mrs. The Monarch?" Gary asked.

"She was Dr. Girlfriend back then, single and free. Of course I had sex with her. I think. I'm just not sure she's a woman. Brock always said she was a post-op tranny."

"She's all woman," Gary insisted, a knot growing in his stomach. Although Dr. Girlfriend had broken his heart, teasing along his crush on her as part of some joke between her and the Monarch, he still felt incredibly loyal to her. The thought of her withering in the clutches of his skinny, bald-headed employers turned his stomach. "I should know, I was the one she sent into town each month for her feminine hygiene products. Doctors may be able to give transsexuals a working vagina but they can't give them a womb. And without a womb they don't menstruate! But she always said nothing happened and if she said nothing happened then nothing happened!"

"Of course, she had to say nothing happened. After she married that jerk. The Monarch is insanely jealous."

"He said they were swingers."

"And you believed that?" Dr. Venture snorted. "I've had my face slapped enough times to know that woman say cone thing in the present of their husband and another when alone. And most swingers only swing in the present of their spouse, or with their spouse's approval. She came on to me, picked me up in a bar in an attempt to get past my defenses so she could inject me with the Monarch's vile bug serum. I remember the injection. Everything after that is pretty vague until I woke up the next morning. And when I woke up she was sleeping next to me. Naked. She was sleeping next to me naked!

"So, maybe she was waiting to make sure the injection had taken effect?" Gary suggested.

"And maybe she was having hot monkey love with me! She hardly needed to get undressed to monitor an injection,. You do for sex!"

"Whatever." As much as he doubted that Dr. Girlfriend would ever want to have sex with Dr. Venture, the doctor's logic about her staying with him till morning made a lot of sense. He recalled, too, the times he'd met her after quitting the Monarch. There had been a sense of ... friendship? A sense of something more than ex-henchman and former Arch. He shook off the thought. "So how does your father come into all this?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.

"You were the one who suggested that my father was sterile. and that he cloned me to have an heir."

Gary nodded. As he understood it Venture's Grandfather and Fantomas had formed the Guild of Calamitus Intent back in the 19th century. Soon thereafter the two family were fighting for control of the Guild While Fantomas had taken over the Guild's day to day operations, Venture had remained as it's titular Sovereign. That crown had passed from Venture's grandfather to his father and eventually to his Son, Dean, who had been necessary to crown David Bowie the Guild's operational sovereign. As long as a Venture were the hereditary sovereign of the Guild none of the many monomaniacal super-villains in the Guild would fight for control over of it. A war of super-villains could easily destroy the world. So it was critical that Jonas Venture produce an heir.

"It's a ridiculous idea, but I can't get it out of my head," Venture was saying. "The only way I'll ever know for sure is to sequence my father's DNA and compare it to mine. If I'm not a clone then half the DNA ought to be different from my father's. But if I'm clone them all if it will be his."

"Except where he fixed his sterility problem."

"With a vengeance." Doctor Venture said gloomily.

"You don't have any memories of a mother?" Gary asked.

"Dad said she'd left when I was young. And after he died I couldn't find any references among his papers to a Mrs. Venture. Well, father was always intent about throwing out personal stuff so i guess he could have thrown away any record of who my mother was. But I looked all around the country for a marriage licence or a birth certificate for me. All I could find was a certificate that dad filled out and submitted on my birthday. I wouldn't know how to act if I found out I had a mother but it would be nice to know i had one. Don't you think so."

"I joined the Monarch's operation to get away from my mother." Gary said.

[]

Gary was flying the X-1.

He had never flown a nuclear-powered, super-sonic airplane before. Or any airplane for that matter. But when they had boarded Dr. Venture had plopped down in the co-pilot's seat leaving Gary in the hot seat. He throw a resentful eye at Dr. Venture as he looked at the immense panel of dials, switches and levers surrounding the pilot's seat. Well, a henchman survives by learning to do a lot of things, often while on the job. He set about trying to identify the various controls.

Brock Samson had had full-on OSI agent training before coming to work for the Ventures so he probably already knew how to fly any airplane ever made. Gary had piloted the Monarchmobile a time or two and hadn't crashed so assuming the X-1 was just a big a bigger version of the Monarchmobile maybe he could pull this off. Still you would think Dr. Venture would offer to fly the damned thing knowing that Gary had never flown it before. But it was just like Dr. Venture to sit down and expect to be chauffeured where ever he went. He never drove anywhere himself. He expected Gary to drive.

But then maybe he didn't know how to fly the X-1. From what he had read about Jonas Venture, and confirmed by the occasional comment by his son, Jonas Venture had dragged his son everywhere around the world, placed him in peril countless times but had never actually let him do anything. If he had been anything like Gary's Old Man, not that Gary had much memories of his Old Man, he probably have never let Dr. Venture touch, let alone fly any of his planes, boats or submarines. And a lifetime of never being in charge had leave Thaddeus Venture an angry but painfully passive man. Even when the X-1 passed into his possession it probably never occurred to Rusty Venture to get a pilot's license. Gary's OSI license-to-kill not only allowed him to kill people with immunity but also covered things like flying planes, driving cars, trucks, piloting dirigibles, spaceships, and captaining boats.

He found a toggle labeled ''wheel lock' and figured that would be a good thing to set to off. The throttles to the jets were where he'd seen them before in airport movies. He movies them forward and the X-1 slowly rolled out of its hanger. The runaway lead straight out from the hanger so he just increased thrust until they were bumping along the concrete at a good clip. He pulled back in the wheel and the plane rose lumberingly into the air. He avoided clipping some power-lines across the road from the Compound and kept on gaining altitude. He grinned to himself. Someone who didn't know any better might actually think he knew what he was doing.

When the altimeter reached 40,000 feet he eased off on the wheel until the altitude stabilized. Then, finding the compass he turned the wheel until they pointed east and flipped on a switch labeled "auto-pilot". Carefully letting go of the controls Gary waited for the plane to plunge into a spiral but it held steady. The auto-pilot must be working. With a sigh of relief that ended up sounding more like a gasp, Gary leaned back in the pilot's chair and relaxed. When his heart stopped thumping an 180 beats a second he reached into his duffel bag and pulled out the OSI's cribsheet on FAA regulations. It was only a hundred pages long, printed on both sides. While his OSI license exempted him from most regulations he still needed to know what the proper protocols were, and how to avoid running into all the commercial aircraft that assumed they had the right-of-way up there. Gary looked over at the jackass he worked for. Dr. Venture was already asleep or maybe just listening to his iPod with his eyes closed. Just as well. Gary had a lot of reading to get through before landing at JFK.

[]

Landing at the New York airport was a lot harder then the take-off had been. Gary had by then contacted the air traffic controllers, filed a belated flight plan and been cleared to land at JFK. A section of the large airport had been set aside for the huge experimental craft to park. Gary had eased the plane down to the runway and made contact with the pavement after only one hard bump. But killing the engines and applying the brakes on the wheels wasn't slowing the plane nearly enough. The buildings at the end of the runway were looming up fast.

"Use the Reverse Thrusters!" Dr. Venture suddenly cried. he waved towards a part of the control panel where Gary made out a switch cryptically labeled ""REV THR" He flipped that up and suddenly the planed jerked backwards, throwing him forcefully against his shoulder harness. Gary had no idea what the 'reverse thrusters' were and how they worked but they brought the great airplane to a quick halt, just shy of running off the runway.

"Any landing you can walk away from," Gary muttered.

"Idiot!" Dr. Venture reminded him. Venture was soaked in sweat from every pour in his body.

A lineman directed the X-1 to its parking space. By the time Gary had set the wheel brakes and shut down the engines and nuclear reactor (fortunately the reactor shut down automatically) he was as cramped and tense as Dr. Venture looked. Gary grabbed his and Dr. Ventures overnight bags and followed the scientist down the ramp the extended out of the back of the plane. As the walked towards a private entrance to the administration building Dr. Ventured snapped, "where did you ever learn to fly?"

"I didn't," Gary confessed, and a moment later had to drop their bags and catch Dr. Ventures as he fainted.


	9. Chapter 9

"Venturestein must die!"

Dean Venture declared this from the old couch he was sitting on in the large hanger where the X-1 was kept.

Triana Orpheus, sitting in the middle of the couch nodded her agreement. "Every second he - it - is alive I hear the screams of a dozen souls ripped apart and sewn together into Venturestein. I don't know how my dad can put up with it. It's driving me crazy! Venturestein must die!"

After a pause Dean and Triana turned to look at Hank Venture sitting at the other end of the couch. "What?" he asked. "I happen to like the V-man. he's cool. Our very own Frankenstein! How many other kids can say that?"

Triana rolled her eyes up to the heavens, not that she expected any answers from that direction. She was magic enough to know that the only answers humans got from the magical dimensions was from down below. "It doesn't bother you that your father created a freak, an abomination of nature. A desecration of things proper in this world?"

"And your father resurrects the dead, isn't that an 'abomination,' too?"

"That's different," Triana insisted, though she wasn't sure on what grounds.

"I miss Gary, though," Hank said.

"What do you mean," Triana asked him, "He only left an hour ago."

"I can't believe he and Pop left for an exciting adventure in New York City and left us behind," Dean said.

"Yeah," Hank agreed, "because someone had to babysit Gary's new friend and that someone had to be us."

The three of them looked through the open doors of the X-1's hanger. Outside, in the sun, Venturestein (Gary called him 'Texas' for some reason) and Spider-Helper were playing catch. Helper would lob the ball to Venturestein in a soft pitch from one of his manipulator/legs, and the patchwork man would race to clasp his hands around the ball, miss, and go running after it before throwing it back in the general direction of Helper. Helper had been a vaguely humanoid robot until an explosion a couple years back had destroyed his body. He had been wedged into Brock Samson's chest for a while before being removed by an underground surgeon. When Brock mailed Header's head back, the boy's father, Thaddeus Venture had mounted the robot's head to the body of a giant spider-like walking thingie instead of rebuilding Helper's body.

"Even when he's here, that's all he does any more," Hank complained, "plays catch with Venturestein, or run flash cards with him, or watch TV together. Gary doesn't have any time for us."

"He's your bodyguard, not your babysitter," Triana reminded him.

"Still..." Hank insisted. The three sat in the cool of the hanger for a bit, watching Helper and Venturestein play.

"I wanted Gary to drive me to town today so I could meet Gloria at the mall,"Dean began, "You know what he did?" Dean slumped in the couch with sad, puppy-dog eyes. Triana waited, knowing that he'd answer with or without her prompting. "He just tossed the keys to the X-13 at me."

"So?" Triana asked. "It's a car and you have a driver's license. What's the problem."

"It's the X-13! It's atomic powered. What if I have an accident?"

"For one thing that car was built in the 60s to 60s car standards. There's more steel in that car than two Lincoln Continentals today. And considering all that Gary put it through when we were running from the Monarch's men last month, and nothing went wrong, I don't think there's any way you crashing can hurt it."

"But..."

Triana's eyes opened as an idea came to her. "Look, you want me to drive you, because I will. I've nothing better to do today."

"Would you?" Dean said.

"She just wants to sneak into town to get some smokes without her dad finding out," Hank said, looking at Triana from the corner of his eye. "Our Triana has quite the fag jones."

"Fag?" She repeated in an unappreciative voice.

"Yeah. Fags, cigarettes, coffin-nails, cough-sticks. Us detective types have got to know all the lingo. Fags is British for cigarettes."

"R-i-ght," Triana answered. "You keep using 'lingo' like that around here and you'll be the "late" Hank Venture, Boy Detective." She turned back to Dean. "Well, what about it, want me to drive?"

Dean was blushing, which seemed like an odd response until you considered the situation. He still thought of Triana as his girlfriend, despite the number of times the witch-in-training had told him she already had a boyfriend. Dean was also very much interested in this girl, Gloria. They had met at the mall where she had been reading a Giant Boy Detective adventure. Giant Boy Detective was Dean's favorite book series. While Triana was the first girl he had noticed as a girl, Gloria was the first girl where he had something in common. Dean was convinced that if Triana found how how much he liked Gloria she might not like him anymore, so he wanted to keep the two girls separate. But as long as he was afraid to drive the X-13, he would have to let Triana drive and risk her meeting Gloria.

From Triana's point of view, Gloria was the best thing that could happen to her because it meant that Dean wouldn't spend as much time moondogging her. And in any case Triana knew all about her from talking with Gary. From what the burly bodyguard had said, Dean had begun a furious conversation with the girl over the internet and from time to time arranged to see her at the mall. Gary had started a dossier on the girl as soon as he realized that Dean was serious about her. He probably knew more about Gloria than Dean did. He thought she was alright and a good influence on Dean, who, lord knows, needed all the help he could get just to grow up to be normal.

"Are you really going just to buy cigarettes?" Dean asked, as if that were the only question involved.

"What's the big deal about my smoking. It's a free country," Triana defended herself.

"Gary doesn't like her smoking," Hank said slyly.

"What does that have to do with anything?'

"I think she likes Gary."

"I do not like -" she started, stopped. "I like Gary, ok, but only as a brother. What is it with you. I've got a boyfriend, Raven, remember. And so does Gary. I mean, girlfriend. he has a girlfriend, alright. There's nothing between us."

"Kim," Hank said languidly. "She's my Nemesis. She is so hot. How many people get to have a hot nemesis like that, uh?"

"You moron, she's trying to kill you!" Dean reminded him.

"But my kung fu skills were too great for her!" Hank insisted.

"Oh, please. You were probably in your Panic Room wetting your pants!" Triana laughed.

"That was me," Dean said, sadly.

Triana stood up and looked down at Dean. "You want to go to town, or what?"

Dean looked at his brother, as he often did before making up his mind. He hopped up and said "Let's go." He tossed the set of keys to the girl.

Hank looked around the open hanger then out to where Helper and Texas were still playing. "Hey, wait for me," he called and scrambled after his brother.

They were cruising through the gate at the Venture Enterprises when Triana said, "you probably ought to tell somebody where we're going."

"Who?" Hank asked. "The only people left on the grounds are Helper, your father and ... Venturestein."

"Tell Helper then," Triana suggested.

Hank made the call on his two-way wrist communicator. Helper was an amazingly intelligent but he only communicated in beeps, from a head that looked like a steam whistle. The boys could understand him just like he was speaking English. When he was done slumped down in the seat as he so often did since watching all those 40s detective films and pushed his brown fedora down over his eyes. He wore the hat because it made him look more like a gumshoe, he'd told her. Triana wondered where the phrase "gumshoe" came from, but wasn't interested enough to look it up on wikipedia.

The six ton, six passenger car with the nuclear reactor in the trunk accelerated smoothly on the road. It was a striking car with a P-38 style front-end, big fins at the back and a sweeping large windshield. The hardtop folded back to make it a convertible but Triana preferred driving with just the windows down. Hank and Dean had both insisted on sitting in the front seat with her. It was certainly wide enough for all three, but she still felt a little crowded.

"So how would you do it, doll-face?" Hank drawled from his position half-way down the seat, "Knife in the back? Garrote? I favor a sniper rifle at 300 yards. Gives the target a sporting chance."

"What are you talking about, and don't call me 'doll-face'," Triana interrupted.

"So-r-ry! I was just trying to start in character."

"Not around me, OK! I hate it when people call me doll-face, or pumpkin or..."

"Doesn't your father call you 'pumpkin'," Dean asked thoughtlessly

"O-o-oh," Hank said with surprise. "Father issues..."

"It's not..." Triana protested then shut her mouth and just drove. With the Venture Brothers sometimes it was best not to argue.

"So how would you do it?" Hank persisted.

"Do what?"

"Kill Venturestein."

"I can't just kill somebody. That's gross."

"You said he had to die. So how would you do it?"

"I want it out of my life. The crying of the souls trapped in that abomination gives me a headache all day long. I can't stand the sight of the creature, but I can't kill it."

"I'd put poison in its food," Dean said. "Lots and lots f tranquilizers so he goes to sleep and never wakes up."

"You never killed anything in your life, Princess," Hank drawled. "Not even a mosquito?"

"Those don't count. I'm not a Buddhist. I don't believe in reincarnation and stuff. But... It's like those 4-Hers in high school who spend all summer raising a steer, grooming it, playing with it, and then after the county fair they take it to some slaughterhouse and bring home a trunk full of steaks. God, that is so sick!"

"So you don't really want Venturestein to die?" Hank teased.

"I want him gone, but I'm not going to push him out. Besides he's Gary's friend. We have to respect Gary's wishes, I guess."

"Gary this, and Gary that, huh?" Hank went on. "Triana and Gary sitting in a tree, K-I-S-" A jet of fire blazed across the width of the car, missing Hanks's nose by millimeters. Dean, who was sitting in the middle, slumped down as far as he could without sliding into the footwell.

"It's not like that!" Triana said harshly. Hank was tempted to say that it was exactly like that but he didn't want to tempt Triana accuracy with magic fire a second time.

"You just spend a lot of time with Gary, is all," he said.

"He's like the only person around here my age that I can talk to."

"He's like twice our age," Dean piped up.

"No he's not," Triana protested. "Maybe ten years, but you know what I mean."

"We're your age," Dean said, sounding a little hurt.

Triana was saved from answering when a car pulled out of a side road in front of her. She tramped on the brakes but the heavy car barged ahead. She leaned her head out the window and shouted abuse at the other driver before flipping him off. The X-13 had cruised up to his bumper because braking finally started slowing it down. The other driver flipped her back and stepped on the gas. Triana gritted her teeth, tempted to step on the accelerator. She know that the nuclear reactor could output enough power to catch up with the other driver in a mile and blow pass him in a satisfying breeze. Then she noticed both boys staring at her. She eased her foot back off the accelerator.

"Gary is just a friend," she sulked. "He's like the older brother I never had."

"The older killer brother," Hank said. A look from Triana quieted any further comments he was going to make.

They were silent for a moment. Finally Dean wondered, "Do you think Gary will ever get around to finding Triana's walking tree?"

"And take time away from his new bestest buddy, I doubt it?" Hank said.

"It's not really 'my' tree," Triana wanted to clarify. "I may have seen it first but I have nothing to do with it."

"Then where did it come from," Dean wondered.

"I think it's one of Pops experiments gone horrible awry. An insane amalgam of plant and vegetable matter that escaped through a window one night and Pop doesn't want to admit that it exists."

"Aside from the melodrama," Triana said, "I kind of agree. Your father must have had something to do with it. Seems harmless enough, though."

"It's just biding its time," Hank suggested ominously. "Like a Venus Fly Trap, waiting for the victim to get fully inside its trap before springing it."

"Venturestein called it a friend." Dean protested.

"Venturestein calls everybody a friend. he doesn't have a lot of discrimination," Triana reminded him.

"Well, I don't think it's one of Pop's. He would have said something if it were. Maybe it's from Outer Space. Maybe its a shipwrecked visitor from Betelgeuse."

"Betelgeuse," Hank scoffed. "Now maybe it's one of those Secret Martians we contacted that one time. Remember?"

"Pop yelled at us for hours, then General Manhower yelled at us and the Secret president. How were we supposed to know that the Secret Martians were so easily offended?"

"Martians?" Triana asked.

"Oh, yeah. They've got some kind of underground civilization of Mars. That why no one has seen them before now. But they're real snooty and won't travel anywhere or talk to anyone. And they hate it when our radio waves interfere with their communing with nature or something. Anyway we just said 'Hello' into this radio we found and nearly caused World War III.

"We were like grounded for a month," Hank said, sounding mostly boastful about it.

"You think this tree is a Martian?" Triana asked.

Hank shrugged his shoulders. "No one has ever seen one. Could be."

"A Martian hiding out on the Venture Compound?" Triana sounded skeptical.

"You got to admit no one would be surprised to find one here."

They road in silence the last mile to the mall. Triana was thinking that no matter how weird things got in her magic classes, it would still be more normal than life with the Ventures. She looked at Dean thinking, we have to talk, but not sure how to separate Dean from his brother so they could have a private conversation. Another time.

The mall was like every other mall, a collection of large blank buildings surrounded by an ocean of largely unused parking lots. Triana found a double-parking spot near the mall entrance and slide sideways into the middle of the two slots. The X-13 was nearly normal car size but that meant a couple feet longer and a couple feet wider than the modern norm. There just wasn't room in a normal parking space for the car and hope to open the doors. "We'll met at the fountain in the central court at 4 o'clock she told them as she armed the defense systems on the experimental vehicle. Dean looked at his watch, exclaimed "I'm late" and started running towards the entrance. Triana watched him run for a moment that leisurely strolled after him, Hank by her side.

"You hear about Dean's latest idea?" he asked.

Triana shook her head.

"That Gloria dame has convinced him they ought to put on a convention for Giant Boy Detective fans."

"Dean, do you want to ever date girls? Then stop calling them 'dames'."

"You chicks have to stick together, don't you." A moment later he was sprawled on the ground.

"Hey! I thought you weren't allowed to use magic outside of school!" Hank protested as he picked himself up.

"That's Harry Potter. Real magic users can use magic anytime they want. But that wasn't magic, that was me, sticking my foot in front of yours." As Hank got red in the face, she asked, "So what this about a convention?"

Hank was happy to fill her in on Dean's plans - Gloria's plans apparently - and why none of it would work. Triana had no idea how much work was involved in putting on a convention, though she recalled a couple Trekkie conventions that Kim had dragged her to. The people in the 'staff' T-shirts all seemed to frantic and harassed. It looked like a lot of work for little personal enjoyment.

She paused with her hand on a door. "Why do you think Dean can't do this? He's a Venture. I thought you Venture boys could do anything? By the way, Hank, you can't keep follow me here," she said.

"I'm not following you."

"Well, you can't come in." She pointed to the sign on the door: "women's rest room."

"Oh. I'll just wait..."

"Why don't you see if your friend Dermott is working today. Why don't you hang out with him?"

"Hey, Dermott! Yeah" Hank said, and started to rush off.

Triana watched to make sure he had left before pushing through the door and sighed with relief as it closed behind her. She went into one of the stalls, locked the door before sitting down. She planned to wait it out in here for fifteen minutes to make sure Hank had gone away.

Fifteen minutes later, Triana left her stall, washed her hands and peeped out the restroom door just to be safe. Hank was gone. She pushed through the door and headed towards the exit. The mall, like most places these days was smoke-free. You couldn't even buy cigarette anywhere inside. But there was a drugstore across the parking lot where she could get a couple cartons, and there were some benches set well away from the doors for smokers. It was shady and pleasant. Who knew, she meet even met up with a cute boy.


	10. Chapter 10

The first sign of danger was the sound of a hurtling body bouncing off the bulletproof glass window in the living room.

"Oh crap," Dean whispered and hurried twiddled with his wrist two-way communicator. "Dad! Pick up!" he prayed.

Hank dashed over to the fireplace and grabbed one of the tools there. He braced himself for the assault with ... a three foot long broom!

The front door crashed open and a half-dozen men in elaborate black and yellow costume with big yellow butterfly wings on the back burst through, seized the two boys and forced them into separate chairs. The men not holding the boys in place began looking around the room for something. Just what didn't matter because at that moment the Monarch sweep into the room and struck a pose, legs apart, finger in the air. "At last, I have you in my power!" he shrilled.

"Are you going to dance or kill us?" asked Hank Venture defiantly.

The Monarch frowned and looked down at his clothes in confusion.

"Because you look like that dork from Saturday Night Fever."

"I only dance with death!" the Monarch rejoined, pulling down his finger and pointing it at the blond youth. "Where is the one they call Gary Fuu?"

"He's in New York, with Dad." Dean said.

"Don't give information to the enemy, dorkous," Hank whispered.

"It's not like it's a secret, pinhead," Dean snapped back.

The Monarch facepalmed, then to give him a moment to think, demanded, "why aren't these boys tied up?"

"We couldn't find any rope, sir," one of the minions answered. The others cringed away from the fool.

"Why didn't you bring any?"

"We, uh, assumed there be something here. And, uh, besides there's no pockets in our uniforms.

"Here, use mine," Dr. Mrs. The Monarch leisurely strolled through the broken door. She tossed a coil of fine silk cord to the minion making the apologies. The Monarch looked at his wife, admiring as ever her tight-fitting tunic with the deep plunging neckline. He leaned over to her. "Where have you been keeping that, my dear?" he whispered.

"I've got a pouch attacked to the underside of my wings," she said. "I keep all sorts of things in it." Her wings were attached to the waist of her costume and draped on the floor, more a gauzy hint of wings unlike the rigid and occasionally working lifting surfaces of the henchmen.

"I never noticed," the Monarch said.

"That's because you're too busy ogling my ass."

"And it's a fine ass to ogle!" The Monarch turned to look at the Venture Brothers. Two chairs had been pushed together, back to back, so the boys could be tied together. No one dared suggest cutting Dr. Mrs. The Monarch's rope.

"Where in New York is this renegade henchman of mine? Answer me or feel the wrath of - The Monarch!" This time he clenched his fist and shook it at the boys.

"I don't know. Dad just up and says he and Gary have to go to New York and left this morning," Dean confessed.

"Dude!" Hank complained

"Gary said something about them going to loot a museum but he didn't say which museum or what they were going to steal."

"Some Boy Adventurer you are. Can't keep a secret or anything," Hank groused, folding his arms under the loops of cord that supposedly bound him to his chair.

"I'm not a 'Boy Adventurer'," Dean complained. "And never wanted to be one. Look, Mr. Monarch, sir, are you going to kill us or what, because otherwise I've really got to take a crap."

"It's 'The Monarch!'" he shouted, then deflated and added, "take him, take him. It's upstairs on the left. I ought to leave you dead in a pool of your own filth!" he started shouting again, 'but you're just not worth it."

A pair of minions came in through the broken door and saluted. "We searched the compound, sir. There's no one else here but the magician and his daughter, and they're in their residence unaware of anything."

"What a fucking surprise," the monarch snarled. "I'm all set to get my revenge on 21 for killing two of my minions and where is he? In New York probably watching some over-priced Broadway play! How am I supposed to have my revenge when no one cooperates!"

His wife joined him near the fireplace and reached up to massage his shoulders. He was always at his most dangerous when he worked himself into one of these fits - and had no one to lash out at. "We'll regroup, sweetie," she growled in her deep, masculine voice. "We'll get the Cocoon running and plan a proper assault on the place, By then 21 should be back here and everything will be all right."

The Monarch kneaded his head for a moment. "Yes, yes, revenge later," he murmured. he pointed to one of the minion, "Tell those two upstairs we're leaving. But not!" he turned to the bound Hank, "before the Ventures feel the wrath of the Monarch!" He looked around for a moment, then seized the TV remote laying on the couch. He flipped on the TV and ran through the channels until he found the Oprah network. He threw the remote on the floor and shot it with a bolt from his wrist cuff. "A couple hours of that should turn you into a drooling morons. A-ha-ha-ha! Oh, and I think I'll take this!" The Monarch grabbed a brightly colored, sealed ceramic vase from the fireplace mantle. "Mark my words, Hank Venture, I will have my revenge!" And he stalked out.

The minions fell in line and followed him out one by one. The minion standing next to Hank growled, "You got lucky kid," as he left. He was bumped on the shoulder by the minion in line behind him. "Don't talk to the vic!" The man scolded. "First you talk to them, then you give them names and the next thing you know you think they're family. Family you have to kill!"

"Sorry," the minion whispered back. "I'm new here. This is my first mission. I didn't know." The older minion grunted and pushed the newbie ahead. As the last minion left, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. took one last look around, shook her head and followed.

Dean came wandering down the stairs a few minutes later. "I've read where terror had turned men's bowels to water," he said conversationally, "but until now I didn't think it was literally true. Oh, man, it came gushing out like Niagara Falls. I must have crapped a gallon!"

"Thanks for sharing. Now will you untie me," Hank said.

Dean knelt behind the chair. "So they just left?" he asked.

"Yeah. After breaking the remote to the TV and stealing one of the urns off the fireplace."

"One of GrandPop Venture's urns?"

"Yeah. he must have thought it was valuable or something. Won't he be surprised to find that all it has are the ashes of some dead guy."

There was a loud "whoomp" and a cloud of sulfurous fumes billowed across the room. "Unhand those boys, you fiend!" a stentorian voice declaimed. "They are under the protection ... " as the clouds thinned they could see a tall bearded man dressed in an ornate velvet jacket, "of Dr. Orpheus?" He sentence ended on a questioning note. "Where is everybody?" he asked. "I came as soon as I sensed you were in trouble."

"You're a little late," Hank snapped. "Dean, how long is it going to take for you to untie that rope?"

"I think I broke a nail."

"Stand back!" Dr. Orpheus commanded, then gestured mystically at the ropes binding Hank to the chair. It fell in a pool at his feet. Hank got up and walked over to the TV. "I am not going to listen to _that _all day," he said turning off the TV.

Dr. Orpheus looked around the house, frowning. "So, everything is alright?" he asked.

"Yeah. The Monarch came around looking for Gary but he and dad are in New York. So he left after breaking the remote and stealing one of Grand-pop's funeral urns." Hank explained.

"I almost crapped my pants!" Dean added.

Dr. Orpheus sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose and questioned, "almost?"

"Then if you boys are Ok I shall be on my way!" he said a moment later, before disappearing in another cloud of sulfurous fumes.

The cloud had barely begun to disperse when Dean's wrist communicator buzzed. "Dad!" he shouted into it.

"No, it's just me," Triana answered. ":Look did my Dad just teleport over there?"

"Yeah."

"Is he alright? - Oh, there he is, back already. Thanks..."

"Triana!"

"What?"

"Aren't you going to ask if I'm alright?"

"You answered your phone so I knew you were alright. Besides, he's my dad. I worry about him a lot more than I do other people."

"Oh," Dean sighed, and broke the connection.

"Hey, dork-for-brains," Hank called from the doorway. "Help me prop this door back in place, then let's go to bed. "I've had enough excitement for one day."

[]

Gary Fuu could have used some excitement about then. "The Heist" as he thought of it was turning into a crushing bore.

After reviving Dr. Venture and finalizing some arrangements for security for the X-1 with airport authorities, Gary had headed off in the direction of the car rental booths, but Dr. Venture had stopped him.

It was cheaper to take a cab anywhere in New York he argued, Gary explained that when planning a caper he preferred to have his own conveyance and not rely on public transportation. "There's no parking where we're going," Venture had declared. "You'll spend more time looking for a place to leave the car then it will take to find a cab. And where ever you do park it will be miles from where we want to go." Considering that Dr Venture had been in New York before while Gary hadn't, he decided to go along with the little man. Watching the meter rack up charges as they were taken to their hotel Gary wondered if it might not have been a lot cheaper to have rented a car after all.

The hotel was old, small and shabby. Gary wondered what made the doctor choose to book here. His question was answered when, after they had checked in, dropped off their bags and gone out and around the corner to flag down a cab. Off in the distance he could see the marquees of several theaters. Broadway! Gary hadn't known about the doctor's interest in theater.

The cab they engaged seemed to double-back a couple times before dropping them off at the Museum of Coiffure Culture. Even so, as the doctor was counting out exact change for the fare, Gary had to nudge him and whisper, "tip him." Reluctantly Venture added a couple dollars.

The museum was housed in an old brownstone, three stories tall and crammed next to other tired, old brownstones. From the cramped and labyrinthine layout Gary guessed it once had been an apartment building. A girl in a tiny room just off the vestibule looked up when they entered. She looked college-age, with thick glasses, hair pulled back in a ponytail and a T-shirt that read, "I'm up here," with an arrow pointing up. Considering how flat-chested she was it seemed like an unnecessary command.

"Two," Gary said, only to have the doctor begin arguing that he deserved a special pass because he was the son of Jonas Venture, whose hair was on display here. The girl stared at him with cow-like complacency, placed a marker in the chemistry book she had been reading and picked up the phone. "I'll have to call the director," she explained.

Gary grabbed his boss and spun him around. "We do not want a confrontation with any one here!" he explained in as low a voice as he could manage. "We don't want them remember that we were here, got it? Just pay the girl."

"This is coming out of your salary," Venture grumbled before paying the girl the $15 admission fee. As they drifted into the first room Gary shot back, "you don't pay me. OSI does."

The first room displayed barbering tool from down the ages, razors, combs and scissors. One display claimed to feature an actual razor owned by Sweeny Todd but Gary noticed that the handle was made of bakelite, a product invented well after the days of Todd. From there they wanted into a room full of wigs, crossed the hall into another room full of busts displaying various hair hair styles and finally a room filled with bizarre creations for some kind of extreme hairdressing competition. None of the rooms had any samples of Jonas Venture's hair. By the time they mounted the stairs to the displays on the second floor Gary was calculation how much C4 it would take to wipe the whole building off the face of the earth. A lot depended on how much damage he was willing to inflict on the adjacent buildings.

The second floor had all the celebrity hair samples. They were organized in no apparent order so the two had to shuffle along the cases looking into each one to see if it was the one they wanted. They found the Jonas Venture display eventually, It was not exactly the last display to be checked but it was close. The display was in a flat, glass toped box roughly four feet long and thirty inches wide and four inches deep. There was a lock on the front of the case and along the side, near the back a discrete magnet based burglar alarm. Gary squatted to look at the lock better. It was a simply key set up, only a couple of wards.

"I could open that with a paper clip," he accidentally said.

"Then let's do it," Dr. Venture said. I happen to have a paper clip in me,"

"Put that away," Gary ordered, glancing around to see if there were any cameras monitoring the room. There weren't. At least none visible but Gary well know that spy cameras were easy to install so no one could see than. "There's still the burglar alarm. We've got to get a magnet to fix that, and I want my set of picks to spring that lock. I doubt that that case has been opened since your father's hair was put in it. I bet that lock is rusted tight."

Gary took a last look at the case before they moved on. In keeping with the low rent nature of the museum there were a couple faded picture of the elder Venture, including one of him having the lock cut. There was a brief typewriter written essay on the life of Jonas Venture, all surrounding a thin loop of wire holding some reddish hair, maybe two inches long. It sort of matched the younger Venture's beard, but beard hair often differs from scalp hair, Gary knew. It seemed strange to think that all that remained of the great man was this handful of thirty year old hair.

They finished browsing the displays so it wouldn't look obvious what they had come for. Gary make mental notes of escape routes and hiding places. Both places where they could hide if necessary and where security might be hiding. Gary seriously doubted that the place had any kind of security, not even a night watchman, but it was always wise to plan for the worst.

They took a cab from the museum to a hardware store where Gary found the kind of magnet he wanted, and then it was back to the hotel. Gary took a nap while Dr. Venture browsed a theater guide. He wasn't surprised when later Venture announced that he had got tickets for one of the evening shows. He was surprised that Venture had picked up two tickets since the man was chronically tight fisted, but considering how poor the TV reception was in the room, Gary was glad to go out.

[]

Since the museum wouldn't open before 10 the next morning, Gary didn't make an effort to get up early. Dr. Venture was still snoring gently, a copy of playbill laying next to him on the bed where he had been read and re-reading it before falling asleep. Gary didn't wake him up.

There wasn't much you can do to disguise a heavy-set dude with an amateurish buzzcut. Some of Gary's disdain for the hairdresser's museum stemmed from his own do-it-your styling. Every couple of month's he's unpack the Flowbee and take a whack at his hair. But he could dress different. Instead of the usual light blue Venture Enterprise jumpsuit he dressed in jeans and a button down shirt. He stuck a cheap disposable camera in the shirt pocket and fitted a brand-new "I heart NY" hat on his head. It wasn't much but it made him look like a tourist, and who pays attention to a tourist.

Dr. Venture had wanted to come along when they heisted the lock of hair but Gary had been adamant about him staying at the hotel. After the scene he had made the day before, trying to get in for free, Gary feared he'd been too easily recognizable if anything were to go wrong. He slipped the gear he's need into a pocket and went downstairs and started walking. He wasn't trying to confuse any trail he might make. He just felt the need for some exercise. and he had some time to kill since he wanted to get there around noon when people would be thinking more about lunch than one fat guy with a bad haircut.

After a mile or so he caught a cab and rode the rest of the way to the museum. The same girl as at the counter, wearing a "Why am I standing here when there is science to do" T-Shirt. She took his money without showing the least evidence of recognizing him from the day before. She had switched to history today. Her book was marked up with highlights in at least three colors. Either she like history a lot or had the most trouble with it. Gary held a GED from the Guild of Calamitous Intent because he had been expelled from high school during his senior year.

He drifted through the rooms again, seemingly randomly. When he got upstairs someone was already in the room with Jonas Venture's hair. He loitered looking at a curl that was said to be from Madonna. He looked to see if there was a cutting from Van Halen, but there wasn't. Pity Gary liked Van Halen a whole lot more than he did Madonna. Finally the other visitor left and Gary got to work. He broke off a little tab of sticky putty and pressed it onto the side of the bar magnet he's bought the day before. Then, with the care a golfer take to sinking a long put, he brought the magnet straight onto the wooded case, sticking it next to the upper burglar alarm magnet. Separating the upper and lower magnets would trigger a signal, but with the new magnet stuck next to the sensor magnet there wouldn't be a change in the magnetic field when he opened the case.

He got out a couple of his picks, carefully slide them into the lock, so they wouldn't leave scratches on the face of the mechanism, he felt out the wards, pushed them out of the way and carefully lifted the glass cover. A glance at his wrist communicator told him he's been at this for all of five minutes. From his pocket he took out a glassine envelope and with a pair of tweezers took hold of half the clipping, teased it loose from the wire holding it in place and dropped the hair into the envelope, taking care all the while not to touch it with his fingers. Dr. Venture had been emphatic about that. Even a little bit of the oils from his fingers could screw up the DNA sequencing.

He stuffed the envelope back into his pocket, carefully rearranged the remaining hair so it didn't look like anything had been taken, then just as carefully used his picks to turn the lock back to the engaged position. He left the magnet on the side of the display case. There was as much risk removing it as attaching it in the first place. In time the putty would dry and the magnet fall down on the table the case rested on. Maybe some day they'd find it, and wonder what it was doing there. As long as he could get out of the museum without triggering any alarm (personnel or mechanical) he didn't care when or if they found it.

He waved at the girl at the front desk as he went out. She lifted a hand and fluttered it at him without looking up from her book. He was whistling as he tripped down the steps to the sidewalk, turned east and started walking. It warmed the heart of a former henchman when a mission falls in line perfectly. he was already looking forward to getting back to the Venture Compound and taking up where he's left off with his damaged old buddy, Texas.


	11. Chapter 11

Because the last time she'd seen her father he had been mediating three feet off the floor in his den, when the doorbell rang Triana got up to answer it. She was a little perplexed to see who was on the other side. Hank and Dean Venture never came around to her father's residence in one of the empty wings of the former Venture Enterprise manufacturing plant. She was about to say something catty when she noticed how pale and sweaty they looked.

"We need an adult!" Dean blurted out.

Triana considered that for a second. "I'll get my dad," she said.

"No, wait!" Hank interrupted. "You can't tell your dad. He'll tell our dad, and he'll tell Gary and all hell will break out. You've got to help us."

"I'm hardly an adult," she started to say before realizing how dumb that was. She was nineteen, old enough to vote, drive a car, and was going to junior college (albeit a secret junior collage for magic users). She was an adult. "I'm your age!" she finished instead. "What do you need my help for?" Actually she sort of had an idea. Even though Hank and Dean were nineteen, like her, at least according to their driver's licenses, they were hopeless incapable to dealing with most anything. At times it was like they were a couple of six year olds.

"We lost Venturestein," Dean said.

Triana rubbed her forehead for a moment. To her surprise the nagging headache she had for the past week had gone away. She wasn't hearing the voices of a dozen anguished souls screaming for surcease. The souls of the death whose bodies had been ripped apart and sewn together to form the resurrected creature called Venturestein.

"Isn't that a good thing?" she finally asked. To her it certainly was.

"Gary will have a fit if he comes back and finds out that we lost his friend." Dean said.

"I thought we all agreed that Venturestein must die? Triana argued. She knew that the boys wanted her help in finding the unholy abomination. And she knew that eventually she'd give in and help them, but she wasn't going to make easy before then.

"But Gary left him in our care. We're responsible. If we lose Venturestein now he'll never trust us with anything ever again. We've got to get him back!" Dean was looking consumed with guilt. Even Hank, the most boisterous of the pair was looking downcast.

"I'm going to regret this but, alright. I'll help. How long has he been gone and which way was he heading?"

"We were hoping you could tell us," Hank said.

Triana sighed. Five seconds in and she was already regretting agreeing to help. "I'm not a fortune-teller," she told them. "I don't do crystal balls. How am I supposed to find him?"

"You say you hear the voices of spirits crying when you're around him, right?" Hank asked.

Triana nodded.

"Well, maybe you could listen for those voices and point out which way they come from."

Triana noticed that Hank had on his fedora. Oh, dear. He was going into his noir detective cosplay again. Bad enough that Dean still thought of her as his girlfriend but Hank in his detective play was almost unintelligent with his weird cant.

"Ok," she said. She thought about leaving a note for her father. But what kind of note could that be. "Out looking for an abomination from hell" wasn't going to placate her father's anxiety. Even "Out with Hank and Dean" was going to alarm her father. Better not to say anything at all.

She stepped through the doorway, closing the door behind her. "Ok, let's do this thing," she said as she lead them out to small patio by the entrance. There were some concrete benches there. She sat down on her favorite bench and, noticing how the boys were crowing in on her, said,."Spread out. Give me some room to think." As she waited for them to move off Triana noticed how many cigarette butts were littering the patio. She had started smoking because it calmed her down from all the stress she'd built up from dealing with her mother's new husband. The Outrider may be well intending but he wasn't her father and didn't have the right to tell her how to live. Of course her father spent a lot of time telling her how to live, too, which was just as annoying. What had started out as the occasional cigarette to calm frazzled nerves was turning into a filthy habit. She had got to cut down. Or at least clean up the patio better.

She shook off the thoughts, closed her eyes and tried opening her mind to the sounds of the other world. With the gate to hell in her bedroom closet only a few yards away it was all kind of noisy. She found herself thinking that maybe it was time to go back to her mother's and take up going to college again. Maybe even visit her erstwhile boyfriend, Raven. She'd barely thought about him all the while she was here.

She tried to shake off those thoughts. When they wouldn't leave she opened her eyes and spotted a cigarette butt lying on the cement at her feet. She focused on that. Not on what it felt like sucking in that harsh cloud of hot smoke but the stubbed out remains. Soon it was all she could see. Thoughts of her mother, her step-father, her boyfriend were all gone. She started to feel a little light-headed. She wondered how her father could concentrate so intently on his meditations that he could forget about gravity and just float there in the air. It took a lot more concentration than this. When he mediated he became so focused that he wasn't even aware of mediating. She closed her eyes again and slowed her breathing until each exhale seemed like it took an hour. She could feel her heart beating in her chest. Soon she could feel not just her heart contracting but the little shudder that passed through her body as the pulses of blood rocketed through her arteries. Then all at once she seemed to fall right thought the beating of her heart into a silence, vast and profound. She opened her mind's eyes into an infinity of white. She was aware of a sense of calm like she'd never felt before.

"Shit, this is better than sex," she thought and with the thought, like a house of cards, the serene whiteness collapsed into a cigarette butt between her feet. But before the whiteness totally disappeared she sensed the screams of tortured spirits. She raised an arm and pointed towards the screams and held it in place until she can totally out of her trance.

"He went that way," she told them. She saw that she was pointing slightly west of north, over the low mountains in that direction. From where she was sitting it didn't look like a particularly logical route to take since it seemed to go straight over rough terrain. Venturestein was making a bee-line to somewhere. Triana wondered what could have taken over his mind so totally that things like hills and valleys didn't matter.

"Thanks, toots," Hank cracked in the gravelly voice he used when he was fully into the noir detective cosplay. "I knew ya'd come through."

"What's better than sex?" Dean asked, envy coming through his simple question.

Triana wasn't sure how to answer that. She was embarrassed that she had even said it out loud. Totally too much information for someone who thinks he's still her boyfriend to hear. But more than that, what was the realm of whiteness she had reached? "I think I touched Nirvana," she whispered, suddenly frightened by how far her mind had gone.

"Let's go Dean. Come on, doll-face," Hank ordered.

"I'm not "doll-face," Triana told him, "and I don't plan to hiking all over those mountains looking for that creature."

"Who's hiking? We'll take the hover bikes."

Triana had seen the boys riding around a couple times on spindly contraptions but had never seen them up close. She still didn't plan to go off with them to drag back the runaway horror but it would be interesting to see what a "hover bike" was, up close.

The bikes were in a locked room in the now empty hanger for the X-1. Even when the X-1 was parked inside there was always an enormous amount of free space inside the hanger. It made one wonder if something else had been housed here before the X-1, maybe a blimp or something.

The hover bikers looked like some kind of free-form art collection of metal tubes but after a moment she could see as kind of looking like a sharply curved banana. The front ended in a large bulb that sprouted a set of handlebars, with a headlight covering the entire front. The banana then swooped down and sprouted a couple of foot rests. On the underside of the tubular footrests were gimbaled cones which apparently projected whatever force it was that made them hover. The cones seemed to shift back and forth on their own to maintain the balance of the bike. The banana then swept up, sprouting a long bike seat with a back rest slightly higher than the handlebars in front. Another set of tubes extended from the banana near the bottom with another pair of projectors. Watching Hank and Dean maneuver the bikes out of the room taught Triana all one apparently needed to know about the bikes. One pushed forward on the handlebar to go forward, pulled back to slow down or stop. Pushing up on the bar made the bike hover higher off the ground. While pushing down on the bar caused it to sink down. Pulling on one handlebar caused the bike to turn in that direction

Since there was only the two bikes and the seats were clearly intended for one person Triana turned and started back to her father's residence. "Come on, Triana, you can ride with me," Dean called. She turned and saw him patting his thigh.

"Yeah, doll, er, toot, er..." Hank ran out of nicknames for women that Triana hadn't already disapproved of. He dropped back into his normal voice, "Triana we're going to need your help once we get closer to Venturestein."

Triana opened her mouth to say "No way" but somehow "Ok" came out instead. Well, this would be more interesting than most days here. As she climbed onto Dean's lap she said, "don't get any ideas, Dean. I've already got a boyfriend."

"Yeah, a cripple," Hank laughed.

Triana fixed him with a stare. She wasn't using the Evil Eye as such since it was a form of cursing. "Don't forget, he's a warlock. I wouldn't make fun of him if I were you."

Hank looked away guiltily, then pulled the brim of his fedora down, "Let's burn rubber, bro," he snarled and sped out of the hanger at a thrilling 15 miles per hour.

Speed was apparently not among the bike's attributes but it easily jumped from the paved road onto the grass and brush covered hills outside the fenced-in Venture Compound. They flowed up the first ridge and down into the valley behind, slide across a small creek without splashing up any water, then began climbing up the next, slightly higher ridge. The bikes traveled with only a slight hum.

Triana found herself rather enjoying the journey, except for Dean's boney knee. She'd have like to squirm around till she found a more comfortable place to sit but didn't want to disturb his concentration. Dean was staring ahead intently, hands rigid on the handlebars, body stiff as a crowbar. At first she thought the sweat on his brow was from the intensity of his concentration. Later she realized that he was just over-excited about having her sit on his lap. Dean was like having a St. Bernard puppy. It was sweet and meant well but at the same time was large and clumsy and demanding. She was more of a cat person, unfortunately. She liked people that didn't demand your every moment, didn't call every hour to see what you were up to. And didn't break into a sweat just because you happened to be touching them. Raven, for example hadn't called her in the two months she's been at home.

Two months? What the hell! What kind of a boyfriend was that? She suddenly thought. He couldn't have been bothered to call her once, to express a certain amount of loneliness because she was gone? She was on the verge of getting pissed at her "boyfriend" when a sharp spasm swepted over her body. She started, knocking Dean's arms and nearly plunging the hover bike into a tree.

Dean pulled back sharply, braking the bike. "What is it?" he asked. Triana pushed off his lap, stepping onto the grass and nearly collapsed to the ground.

"It was like a bunch of people were suddenly screaming in my head, then they all shut up."

"The Jedi's are going to hear about that one," Hank drawled.

Triana looked at him blankly, "What?" she asked, annoyed.

"You know, when Alderon was destroyed in Star Wars. Obi-Wan could hear the voices cry out then ceased to exist."

"And you wonder why you never had a girl," Triana said. She sat up, instinctively pulling her skirt down between her legs. 'Anyway I think this is more like 'Lassie,' you know, Timmy's in the well."

"I had a girl. I had more than a girl. I've had sex!" Hank insisted.

"Sure, you did. With who?"

"Ah-h-h. I don't know, but I left a message to myself that I had sex, and it was fantastic."

"Yeah, It was so fantastic he had his mind erased," Dean laughed.

Triana considered the first time she had had sex. It had been hurried, sordid and surprisingly unsatisfying. And at such a young age that she hoped her father would never find out. Still she would never voluntarily wish that memory away. She couldn't imagine what kind of sex Hank could have had that he'd want to both remember and forget all about. it.. What was it Gary had said? living with the Ventures was like living in the center of Weird.

She stood up and dusted off her skirt. "Well, let's get going. Venturestein is still straight head, but I got the impression that the voices were startled because he was falling . Maybe he fell into a well, or off a cliff or maybe he stepped into a cave. He can't be that much farther ahead." She climbed back onto Dean's lap and they slowly took off.

Topping the next ridge presented them with a conundrum. Rising from the base of the little valley beyond was a sheer rock face rising maybe a hundred feet. As they got near they could see a numbers of scratches, fresh broken off pieces and such to show that Venturestein had gone this way, straight up the cliff.

While the cliff rose at about a 50 degree angle, difficult but not impossible to climb, it was too steep for the hover bikes to ascend and too tall for the bikes to rise over. Dean could get his bike to rise maybe twenty feet off the ground but that was it. At that height the bike was sufficiently wobbly that Triana had to close her eyes and just trust to fate.

Hank pointed off to one side where, maybe a quarter mile beyond where the cliff looked a little more broken up. They drifted down there and found a series of ledges and ramps that they could climb up. It was slow work and at times Triana considered - and even offered - to get off and walk when the trail looked too narrow to go on.

Once above the cliff they found a wide meadow of lush tall grass. A streak in the middle running as straight as a ruler showed where Venturestein had gone. The trail of trampled grass ended abruptly in the middle of the field. They cut across the grass, aiming for where Venturestein's trail ended.

It ended in a sink hole, maybe seven-eight feet across. Soil had washed away around the hole leaving a ring twelve feet wide surrounding it. It would have been hard for anyone to have just falling into the sink hole, anyone other than the monomaniacal minded zombie. He'd march straight out of the grass and into the hole.

They parked the bikes at the edge of the grass and cautiously approached the hole. The ground seemed solid enough around the hole so they peered over the edge. Venturestein was at the bottom of the pit, maybe twenty feet below them. He was busily trying to climb up the far side but the walls were too smooth, with too few handholds. He'd get a few feet off the ground, fail to find a place to plant his feet and after a moment's scrambling would fall back to the dirt littered floor. Where he would just pick himself back up and try again.

"Hey, Venturestein!" Hank called, "how are ya?"

"Ha-n-n-k friend. Cocoon - home," the patchwork man answered. He didn't even pause to wave as he scrabbled at the pits side.


	12. Chapter 12

Peering down into the sinkhole where the zombie creature Venturestein was trying to climb out, Hank asked, "Need some help?"

"Going home..."

Hank looked thoughtful for a moment then turned to his brother. "Give me your belt."

"Sure." Dean fumbled with the buckle before drawing out the strip of leather. Hank had already pulled his belt loose and tied the two together. He looked at Triana speculatively.

"Sorry, I don't have a belt," she told him.

"What about the hosiery, doll-f- - er, Triana?" Hank was once again in character.

"Hosiery?" Triana asked, not because she didn't know what he was asking about. She just didn't believe that people - not even Hank Venture - still used words like that.

"You know, the gam glamours, the nylonorinos, the silken slipcovers."

"They're socks, Hank. just plain ordinary socks."

"But they come up over your knees?"

"OK, then stockings."

"We just need a couple more feet and we should be able to reach Venturestein."

With a sigh, Triana kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings. As she handed them to Hank she added "if they get a run in them you're buying me a new pair."

Hank knotted them to the end of the belts. He tugged on the make-shift rope to make sure all the knots were secure, then, leaning over the rim of the pit, dropped the rope down. After a second he pulled it back up.

"Dean. I'll need your pants," he announced.

Dean promptly unbuttoned his pants and started pushing them down. Hank was also taking off his pants. Triana sighed and turned away. "I don't care how much you need it, I am not giving you my skirt!" she told them.

"This should be enough," Hank said knotting one leg of his pants to the rope and the other leg to a leg of Dean's pants. He handed that end of the make-shift rope to his brother. "Hold on while I scale down. I'll tie Venturestein to the end and you can pull him up." Hank wrapped his end of the rope a couple times around his wrist, then slipped over the edge of the pit and started walking down the side.

Curiousity got the best of Triana and she turned around to watch Dean wearing a button down shirt and a pair of super-hero underroos playing out the line to Hank. He was leaning back against Hank's weight. Triana walked up beside him. She'd offer to help but didn't know what to do. It looked like Hank and Dean knew what they were doing. It always amazed her when they did, because it was always when doing something she'd never have a clue about.

Hank was about half way down when his foot slipped away from the rock face. He spun around on the make-shift rope and fell a couple feet, sending a jerk up the rope. The jerk caught Dean off guard or maybe was just too much. He was a lot lighter then his brother. With a cry he tumbled over the edge of the pit, taking the rope with him.

"Dean!" Triana screamed. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was OK since she hadn't heard his death scream but at the moment all she saw was a friend plummeting into a deep hole.

"I'm ok," Dean called back, shakily. "I think."

"He ought to be," Hank added. "He feel right on top of me!"

"Hank! Are you alright?"

"Oh, sure, it takes more than a little fall to put ol' Hank Venture out of commission."

"Thank god," Triana said. After a moment she added, "how are you going to get out of there?"

"We'll throw the rope up to you. Catch it and we'll climb up it."

Triana had her doubts about the last part. She'd never done well on rope-climbing in Gym class. If she couldn't pull herself up a rope how was she supposed to hold on while Hank or Dean, who were much heavier than her, pulled their way up?

She knelt down at the rim of the pit and leaned over. Hank was balling up the pants at the end before hurling it up at her. The pants unrolled almost immediately and slowed the rope to a stop well beyond her reach. He pulled in the rope and tried again. Again it fell short.

"Put a rock in your pants pocket," Triana suggested.

"There're no rocks down here," Hank answered. "it's all soft dirt."

Dean was scuffing at the dirt. "Maybe if we can dirt down enough we'll find some loose rocks," he suggested. They dug for a few minutes, making a hole a foot deep but the dirt merely got harder, more packed together.

"Nothing," he reported.

"I'm going to call 911. I'm getting a signal out here," Triana said.

"Don't bother," Dean told her with a groan and sat down on the dirt to mope. "They won't come out."

"They have to. It's an emergency!"

"He's right, sweet-cheeks," Hank drawled in his detective voice. "Them coppers don't care about us Venture Brothers, no way, no how! We're on our own, toots, and I like it like that."

"Dean, talk some sense into your brother," Triana ordered before realizing that Dean was no more capable of being sensible than his brother.

"It's true, you know," Dean called up to her. "We get attacked so often that the local police and fire departments no longer respond to our calls. There's too much risk of them getting hurt in a cross-fire."

"But you're not being attacked by anybody, and you're on state property."

"Doesn't matter, Toot, - too- Triana," Hank stammered. "They don't like us."

"O Molock!" Triana muttered. "Who knows when Gary and your father are getting back. I suppose I could take one of your bikes back to the Compound and get a rope. Any idea where a rope might be?"

"We try not to keep rope around the place. People use it to tie us up," Dean answered.

"Of course." In a Venturecentric universe it made perfect sense to avoid keeping rope around. Triana knelt down by the rim of the hole and stared down at the two boys and tried to think of some way to rescue them. She recalled the story of the magpie that got water out of a bottom of a pitcher by dropping pebbles into it until the water reached the rim. Assuming there were any rocks around here, it would still take a awful lot of them to fill in the pit. What about a log? If she could drop one end of a log, or a large branch into the pit the boys could climb up the log and out. Except there were no trees anywhere close. Triana sighed.

"Double llama!" Hank suddenly shouted.

"Of course, double llama!" Dean stood up. He stuck his fist in the air with two fingers in the air, forming a "V." Hank followed suit. They touched fingers together and shouted, "Go, Team Venture!"

Triana tried not to, but she ended up rolling her eyes. Wmat mooks. She had no idea what a double llama was.

Hank picked up the make-shift rope and wrapped it around his waist. The boys then lined themselves back to back then reaching up interlocked their arms. Slowly, one step at a time they walked towards the sides of the pit, leaning back to keep their arms linked. "Ready to plant?" Hank asked, speaking in his normal voice. Dean said yes.

"OK, plant!"

Together they raised their left feet and placed it on the wall of the pit.

"Ready?" Hank asked.

"Ready."

"On three, plant!"

Triana could see them push against each other,becoming as rigid as boards. At three both raised their right leg and planted it on the wall of the pit next to their left foot. They were hanging a couple feet off the ground, wedged by main strength against the wall of the pit. Hank counted to three and they simultaneously moved a foot up, keeping braced against the wall with the other foot. Hank counted to three again and they moved up the other foot. Slowly they were climbing up the side of the pit.

Triana watched they maneuver with rapt attention. She's never seen the brothers work together so well. Or recognized how strong Dean had to be to keep up his part of the human bridge. And it surprised her that after knowing them for so long we had never seen this side of them before, confident, thoughtful, clever, not just focused on their situation but proactive in solving their problem. Normally they were so naive and clueless, then, like a switch turning in their brains they were world-class boy adventurers!

They were most than half way up before Triana realized there would be a problem. They were doing great walking up the wall of the pit but how were they going to grab hold of the rim and pull themselves out without losing hold of each other? They needed something to grab on to. Triana also recalled where she'd seen this before, in that old cartoon movie about the Aztec Emperor. Things are always easier in cartoons because bodies only obeyed gravity when they're required to. In the real world gravity was something that couldn't be ignored.

What was there that she could hold out for them to grab?

A look around the rim of the pit showed nothing useful. No branches, no rope, There was just her. And they'd pull her right in if she just reached out to them. She needed an anchor. Another glance around - maybe one of the hover bikes would do that.

She ran back to where they were parked. The boys had turned therm off and she couldn't figure out how to start them again. She got back off and started pulling one after her as she returned to the pit. The bike hit a small bump on the rock surrounding the pit and jammed there. It was only a couple feet from the edge. She considered that maybe that was close enough.

She looked over the edge. The boys were just a few feet from the top. She sat down and looked for a way to hook a foot around the bike to anchor her. Try as she might, there was no place to hook her foot in place. The simply tubular design just didn't offer a place where she could anchor her foot. She would have to hold on to the bike with her hands. She turned around so she could get a hold on to the bike, then she inched herself away from the bike, extending her legs into the air over the pit.

Her legs instantly sagged in the air. The strain from holding her leg straight was something fierce. she'd never practiced keeping her body straight like this. Her muscles ached almost at once. She touched something soft and fleshy in the air.

"Careful!" Hank called.

"Is that you?" she asked.

"It aint the abominable snowman," Hank told her.

"Can you reach my foot?" she asked.

"Too far," Hank said. "Can you push yourself out any farther?"

Triana inched out some more, extending her arms over her head now so she could hang on to the bike. She felt with her toe along Hank's leg, to stay in touch with him. She stopped with a jolt when her toe touched cloth. Gritting her teeth she inched along the underoos until she reached more flesh, hopefully that was Hank's stomach.

"I don't think I can go any further," she said. Her hips were hanging in the air over the pit. She could straighten her arms out a little more but then most of her weight would be over the rim and wouldn't be able to keep her weight off the boys.

"That's ok,"Hank told her. "Hey, bro, ready to hold on?" he asked Dean.

Dean gasped out a 'yeah.'

"On three," Hank said and started counting.

On three he heaved himself up and disengaged one arm from his brother. He grabbed at Triana's ankle. He'd barely got a hand around it when the human bridge he and Dean had formed collapsed. As Hank lost traction against the wall of the pit he he fell dragging Triana's leg with him. He swung against the wall, hitting with a breath-taking jolt. Dean swinging from Hank's arm, hit a moment later. .

Pain seared through Triana's body as the weight of the two boy's jerked on her leg and at her arms. For a moment she was sure her leg was going to be ripped off. Just as the pain was dying down new pains shot up her leg.

"Hank? Dean?"she called. She couldn't see into the pit to know if they were ok.

"We're here," Dean gasped, panting. I'm climbing up Hank now. I'll be up to you in a second."

The jerking continued then a new hand clamped on Triana's leg. Then a second hand gripped her and pulled painfully on her leg. A moment late the hand wrapped itself around her hips. Dean's face smashed into her thigh then he swung a leg out and grabbed for the rim of the pit. A moment later he had scrambled to his feet and was holding on to Triana as Hank climbed up her leg and scrambled onto the surface.

Triana hung half over the pit. She tried to swing a leg up and scramble out like Hank and Dean had done but her legs felt leaden. She could barely move.

"A little help," she said and the boys were grabbing her arms and pulling her up just like that. She took a step and her legs gave up under her. She leaned against the hover bike and rested. She had never thought of either Hank or Dean as being athletic before. She was amazed how easily they had walked up the wall of the pit. And that they had even thought about doing that.

Hank had unrolled the make-shift rope and tied an end to the force projector of the hover bike. "We should have thought about this before," he said as he eased himself over the edge and lowered himself once more into the pit. A moment later he called out "Haul Away," and Dean started pulling in the rope. Venturestein was lashed to the other end.

Dean untied the zombie and tossed the rope back down to Hank. As he turned to see how his brother was doing, Venturestein turned on his heels, oriented himself in the direction he had been going and started walking.

Straight for the pit.

Again.

"Dean!" Triana cried, struggling to her feet. Dean turned and tackled Venturestein before he could fall into the pit again.

Dean and Triana struggled to restrain the patchwork man while Hank finished climbing out of the pit.

"I don't know what's got into him," Dean said, "but if we don't restrain him he's going to keep on going where-ever he's going.

"No problem, bro," Hank said, untying the parts of the rope. Using the belts they tied Venturestein's arms and legs together. He finished disasembling the rope, handing Dean his pants and Triana her stockings. She looked at them and decided against putting them on. She was glad when, a moment later Hank asked for them again. Venturestein, despite already being hog-tied, was still trying to squirm loose and continue going North by north-west - and straight into the pit. They had to cinch him to Hank's hover bike with Triana's stockings. She was glad to loan them since it meant Hank and Dean could put their pants back on. She didn't want to admit it, but seeing Hank and Dean in their childish underpants was more than just a little unsettling.

The flight back to the Venture Compound was uneventful. Triana asked Dean to lag back because the cries of the tortured spirits locked in Venturestein's body was giving her a headache. She was beginning to regret going on this expedition. It had seemed fun at first but now that every joint and muscle in her body was wrenched it seemed more like a bad dream she had to endure until it was over. She as determined to draw a hot bath as soon as she got home and soak till morning. And the worst of it was that in probability Dean had looked up her skirt when he was climbing out of the pit. If he ever so much as said anything about that! - she was just going to lose it.

The X-1 was still out when they got back. Gary had implied that they'd be back from their New York adventure before this. The boys had talked about what to do with the mixed up creature. Since he seemed determined to keep running to where ever he was going, he couldn't be left alone anymore. The room he had in the residence couldn't be locked. It didn't seem right to lock him in the panic room. Dean remembered the small office in the hanger. It was lined with maps of the world so it must have been where Jonas Venture planned his world-circling adventures. But it had an old fashion door that could be locked from the outside and not unlocked from inside. They decided to put him there until Gary and their father got back. Then they'd leave it to Gary to figure out what to do.

Triana hopped of Dean's bike as soon as it came to a stop. "Gotta go," she said. "headache,"

"Oh, I thought we could order in a pizza and have a..." Dean began, but she just waved her arm. "Later."

"Oh, finkleberg!" slender boy swore. He was still uncomfortable using actual profanity. As Triana was disappearing through the overhead doorway of the hanger Dean recalled some advice he's seen in a teen magazine. Always be truthful in your relationships it had advised. "Triana," he shouted, "I'm sorry I looked up your skirt. "I didn't really see anything!"

The girl stopped in her tracks. She seemed to slump down for a moment, then turned and gestured mystically at Dean, before stalking out of sight.

"What was that all about," Dean asked his brother. "Oh. That." he grumbled, as a tiny bolt of lightning struck him from the equally tiny thunderstorm hanging over his head. A tiny shower of rain fell upon him. "What did I do wrong?"he asked his brother. "The magazine said you should never keep secrets from your significant other."

Hank have falling to the floor laughing.

"I thought stuff like this only happens in cartoons? It's meteorologically impossible!" Dean stalked towards the family residence, followed by his faithful black cloud of gloom.


	13. Chapter 13

For someone who complained about the cost of a hotel in New York City, Dr. Venture was quite willing to open his purse and for a couple mid-range tickets to a couple Broadway musicals. While the revival of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" was kind of fun - it reminded Gary of Henchman orientation - if it had been up to him once they had heisted the hairs of Jonas Venture, Sr. they would have gone direct to the X-1 and put several states between them and any potential pursuit. Dr. Venture wanted to see a matinee. Then over a tediously long dinner the super-scientist told of his hopes of writing a Broadway musical based on his life. Gary decided not to tell him that he was thinking of writing a book, too. He was thinking of titling it "Every Thing I Needed to Know I Learned from Henching."

Did they go to the plane, then? No, it was off to see "Little Shop of Horrors." "It wasn't really a seed from outer space," Dr. Venture said. "Just one of my dad's experiments that got loose."

"What about that walking tree? Is that one of your dad's experiments?"

Dr. Venture denied that it was but, oddly, added, "If you ever do see it, burn it on sight. Don't even try to talk to it!" When Gary asked why, Venture started babbling about the musicals he liked best. Gary wondered what the old man was hiding, but not enough to press him on it.

And of course after the show Dr. Venture had to go backstage, not that security let him, but he spent a hour trying. Only then did he finally agree to catch a cab out to the airport. It was dawn by the time Gary ran the X-1 into the hanger. He had been up for 24 hours straight by this time and starting to see double-vision. He wasn't sure but it looked like someone had locked Texas in the flight room. That couldn't be right. Dr. Venture has slept on the flight back. He was whistling tunes from the shows between quoting clever passages. Gary noticed that the front door had been broken down but the boys had called the night before to mention the Monarch's visit. He dumped Venture's bags in his room and headed back down. He was going out to his room in the guard shack but got only as far as the couch in the living room. He kicked off his boots and threw himself down. It wasn't clear whether he was asleep or just paralyzed from fatigue.

He awoke briefly a couple hours later when Hank and Dean wandered down for breakfast. He opened his eyes long enough to identify who was walking through the living room and closed them again. There was something different about Dean, he thought, but couldn't place a finger on what was different. Maybe it was because he was wearing his swimming suit at daybreak. Whatever. The boys were weird. Gary slept on.

A bit after one Gary woke up again as Dr. Venture dropped onto the couch at the other end, slapping Gary's feet out of the way. He turned on the TV and changed channels to a soap opera. Though Gary could have slept for several hours more he knew he wasn't going to get any more sleep here.

"Laying down on the job, eh?" Dr. Venture quipped as Gary felt around for his boots.

"Hows the DNA sequencing going Got an answer to your clone question yet?" Gary grumbled.

"Oh, it's fine. It'll take a couple more days before we'll have any results but I got the hair into the sequencer. How 'bout getting me a cup of coffee."

Gary stood up and stretched. That was accompanied by an amazing number of pops and cracks. "Coffee sounds good," he said, picked up his overnight bags and marched out of the residence.

At his guard shack Gary throw a double helping of coffee into the maker, turned it on and stripped off his clothes. He took a quick shower before dressing in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. He left like he had earned a day off so he wasn't dressing in a Venture Enterprises jumpsuit. Since his extendo-knives looked a little garish when not covered by long sleeves, he left them off, strapping a knife to one ankle and a tiny .22 automatic to the other. He poured the coffee into a large thermos and headed for the door when he saw the box of flash cards laying in the table where he had left them an eternity before. though it was only like 48 hours on the clock. He picked them up and headed to the hanger. He regretted not having had more time for Texas and planned to make up for it today.

The hanger looked at same as when he left it - oh, wait, just that morning. Dean was out, though, sitting on a lawn chair just inside the hanger door. Hank, surprisingly, was not there. It was rare to find the boys separate. He walked over to a table, set the thermos down and found his coffee mug among the rubble on the table. He wiped it out with a napkin before pouring coffee into it. He always figured that if the coffee was strong enough it would sterilize whatever was in the mug.

He took a sip and savored the burn as it descended into and knotted up his stomach. Yeah. That was the stuff, he thought. Another sip and he turned back towards Dean. Something was not right about the boy. Carrying the mug with him he walked back towards the boy. Lawn chair - check. Swimming suit - check? puddle under the chair - check. Black cloud over Dean's head. That was it. "So I wasn't hallucinating this morning," Gary muttered and turned back towards the table. "You really do have a black cloud hanging over you."

"Triana cursed me," Dean said mournfully.

"Ah," the henchman said, as if this was totally normal. He turned away again, took a step and stopped, looked at Dean again. "Do you ever get hit by those little bolts of lightning?" he wondered.

"Constantly. It's like sticking your finger into a light socket."

"You do that often?"

"Not anymore."

"Good, it's not healthy." Gary turned again, started to step away and stopped. I'm going to regret this he thought. Out loud he asked, "Why did Triana curse you?"

"I told her I was sorry that had looked up her skirt."

"Dude, that's the last thing you tell a girl!"

"It was an accident. I was climbing up her leg and had to look up and..."

"Why were you climbing..." Gary interrupted. "Never mind. At this rate you'll just end up tell the whole story piece by piece backwards. Forget that. Why is Texas locked in the office?"

Dean turned around to look at the small cubical against the side of the hanger. "He tried to run away yesterday. We followed him. Then he fell in a hole. Then we fell in trying to get him out. Then Triana helped to pull us out of the pit and that was when I accidentally looked up and saw her panties. But not really. And then she cursed me and I had to sleep in the bathtub. Do you think you could talk to Triana and get her to take the curse off me. I really don't want to sleep in the bathtub again."

"See, I ask the right question and I get the story in the proper order," Gary said. "Did Texas say why he was running off?"

"Said he was going home."

Gary thought about that for a moment. "Which way was he going?" he asked.

Dean pointed off towards the hills past the Compound. Gary frowned at that. Dean was pointing in the direction of the last known location of the Monarch's Cocoon. Could Texas have really been making a bee-line to the Cocoon. How did he know where it was. And why go there?

"Gary, please talk to Triana. Get her to call off this curse."

"I don't know, it looks kind of cute on you." Dean only groaned "Have you tried to apologize to her?" Gary asked.

"She wouldn't pick up her phone."

"Well, you did embarrass her by telling her you look up her skirt. All things considered, a personal black cloud hanging over you head isn't the worst thing should could have done. She could have turned you into a frog."

"I don't want to be a frog again."

"Again? - Never mind. Look. if it's still raining on your parade at supper-time I'll have a talk with her," Gary promised. He finally went back to the table to refill his cup. Next to the was a small doll's parasol. He didn't remember seeing it there before. He picked it up and looked it over, finally popping it open. It was about twelve inches across, covered in rows of lace. He closed and called out to Dean. "I think someone is feeling a little sorry." He tossed the tiny umbrella to the Venture Brother.

Picking up the flash cards Gary unlocked the office box and let himself in.

The patchwork man had been trying to force his way through a solid wall on the north-west side of the room. He had dented the metal paneling some but had made no real progress escaping nor had he given up trying.

"Texas!" Gary called out, "Long time, no see! How are you doing."

"Twey-un" the creature replied. He stopped slamming against the wall. He came over and clasped the burly man in a clumsy hug. "Let's go home cocoon."

"This is your home now, Texas. I don't think they'd recognize you at the Cocoon." This was certainly true. Texas - Venturestein - had a head of kinky African hair as well as a large part of black skin running down one side of his face. One arm was longer than the other. He didn't have two left feet but only because Dr. Venture had lucked into finding a viable right foot to replace Texas' damaged one. Texas' nose and chin had been repaired - badly - but not replaced. Gary could see what remained of Texas in the creature's face, only because he had known him so long. The other henchmen, weren't likely to.

"Cocoon Texas home."

"No, here is home." Gary insisted. He pointed to a desk in the room. "Sit down. let's do some cards."

"Go fish?"

"No. Shapes. Want to see how the o' memory holding out." Gary said.

"Go fish more fun."

Gary shrugged. Probably true. He opened the box of flash card and dumped them into his hand. Straightening them out he started shuffling them.

"Hank and Dean said you ran away yesterday. What was all that about?"

"They don't like me."

"Of course they do," Gary insisted.

"Venturestein know better. Can see they hate in eyes. Purple girl, she hate most."

"Triana?" Gary asked skeptically. She had explained about how she could hear the constant screams of the different souls that were bound up in his old comrade. He didn't think she hated him exactly. He didn't want to think she could hate his old friend. so he changed the subject.

"So what happened with General Manhower? I thought he was going to be your new home."

Texas looked confused for a moment, scratched the afro on one side of his head. "Manhower bad man. Always shouting Venturestein. Call Venturestein stupid and ugly. Always telling Venturestein to do stupid stuff like charge machine gun fire. Venturestein not stupid."

Gary held up one of the cards.

"Dog." Texas told him. Gary looked at the label on the back of the card. It said 'dog.'

"Still," Gary suggested gently, "isn't it the duty of a henchman to obey the orders of his Arch?" Arch was short-hand for Archvillain. In the game between OSI and the Guild of Calamitous Intent Archvillains attacked their super-scientist Nemesis. Within the Guild the henchman career was a well defined and honorable one. It was understood that Arches expected Henchmen to be absolutely loyal; it was also understood that henchmen weren't expected to be fools. Texas should have stayed with General Manhower, his new Arch, but if Manhower was telling to run into machine-gun fire, there was no expectation of loyalty from a henchman.

"Venturestein stay. For while."

"But you left eventually." Gary held up another card. "Horse" Texas said. That was what the label on the back said as well.

"Who left first? Where did he go?"

"One day Ernie not there. Manahower very mad. Don't know where he went. Home maybe. we all wanted to go home."

"He ever say where home was?" They went through moon, cow, window, before the resurrected man answered.

"Ernie never say. Bill went next, said he was going 'bama."

"Was Bill from the Cocoon?"

"Not Cocoon. Maybe Phantom Limb. Maybe White Robe."

A pyramid, a circle, a fireplace went by as Gary thought about that.

"Did all of you talk about the same, like you? Or did some of them have more vocabulary?" Texas looked blank. "You know, used big words," Gary added,

Venturestein shrugged.

"But you all wanted to go home?" the man-thing nodded. "Why?"

"No one felt this where belong. No feel welcome there. And Manhow no like us."

"So one by one you all left?" Gary asked. Venturestein nodded. "And you all wanted to go home, but you all had different homes to go to?"

Venturestein reached out and took the next card off the pile in front of Gary. He looked at the front of it intently then asked "Got any zebras?" and laughed in a half-hearts sort of way. Gary shook his head.

"Go fish," the zombie said, laying down the card he was holding. It pictured a zebra.

"Did you ever hear from any of your fellow - ah - Venturesteins, after they left.

"Army folk brought back some."

"How many?"

Venturestein looked at his fingers as he counted off one, two three, "a lot". Gary wasn't sure how to interpret that. Was 'a lot' that same as four? Or did it just mean that after three Texas had given up counting.

"What happened to them?" Gary asked.

"They ran away again."

"So in the end no one stayed?"

Venturestein shrugged again. "Don't know everybody. Left before then."

"Why did you come here?"

"Couldn't find Cocoon. Remembered this place. Felt like almost home."

"You were going to the Cocoon yesterday?"

"Home."

"How did you know where to find the Cocoon?"

Venturestein just shrugged. "Can hear - in head - somethings."

Gary grunted. That didn't explain anything and yet was probably going to be all the explanation he was ever going to get out if the patchwork man. "Look. Texas, it's important that you get this. The Cocoon is no longer your home. Everyone there thinks your dead. If you show up they will just panic and try to kill you. This is your home now. We'll take good care of you here. Don't go wandering off to the Cocoon. OK? It's not your home anymore." Gary looked to see if the zombie understood him. His face just did not have the expressiveness of a normal face. The nerves to the facial muscles had never been connected properly. Well, he'd just have to assume that Texas did understand.

He picked up the next card and held it up. The label on the back said "tree," Gary wasn't expecting Texas to say "friend."

Gary turned the card around and looked at it. There was a stylized deciduous tree shown on the front, with a brown trunk and a greenish ball of leaves at top. He turned it back to face Texas, "tree?" he asked.

"Friend!" Texas corrected.

Gary thought about it some more, then got up and lead Venturestein out of the room across the hanger and out to the overhead door. Venturestein stared at Dean and his little black thundercloud as they passed. Outside the hanger Gary pointed to a lone tree growing on the land across from the Venture Compound. It was a pine, tall, straight and triangular. Gary pointed to it. "Friend?" he asked.

"That tree." Texas declared.

Gary looked around for a tree with a rounded crown. The best he could do was an ornamental shrub near the main entrance to the Administration building. "Friend?" Gary asked.

"Tree" Texas told him.

Gary led him back to the office. He picked up the card of the tree. "Friend?" he asked.

"Picture," Texas told him.

"Not friend?"

"Look like friend, but not him."

Gary looked at the picture again. "What makes him a friend?" he asked.

"Friend find me. Showed where could get out of weather, hide during day. Bring food. Tell funny stories."

"He looked like a tree but he could walk?"

"No legs."

"But he could move?" Texas nodded.

"He talked to you?"

"Funny man. Tell lots of jokes. Like: 'knock knock.'"

"Who's there?" Gary prompted.

Texas looked confused for a moment, then repeated, "knock knock."

Gary guessed that Texas couldn't remember the rest of the joke.

"Was your friend all green, or was he like this picture, with a brown trunk?"

"All green."

"How tall?"

"taller than you."

"Twice as tall?"

Texas shook his head.

"Where can I find him."

"Him no like being found." Texas told him.

"But I just want to thank your friend for taking such good care of you."

Texas thought about that for a minute. He shook his head. "Friend secret."

Gary asked some more but Texas remained adamant. He would not lead Gary to his friend or tell him how to find the walking, and apparently talking, tree. After a while Gary gave up asking questions and just held up the flashcards. Texas could name all the pictures which spoke well of his memory but had trouble forming complete sentences. And he never used "I" or "me" when speaking about himself.

After a while Gary called it quits for the day. He was going to leave Texas free to roam but noticed that as soon as he put the cards away and started cleaning up the place, Texas had walked over to the north-west corner of the room and tried to force his way through the wall. With a sigh, Gary turned the lock as he left the room.


	14. Chapter 14

Night was falling over the Venture Compound. Dean Venture was still sitting in a lawn chair in front of the overhead doors of the big hanger, a miniature black cloud still raining down on him. He was wearing only a swimming suit and was beginning to get cold as the day's heat evaporated into the night. He looked like he was crying but that was probably just the rain running down his face.

He heard the click of shoes on pavement and turned to see Triana Orpheus step around the edge of the hanger door and walked towards him. She was dressed in a dark T-shirt with a large skull printed on the front, a black mini-skirt and thick-soled shoes. Normally she also wore stripped thigh-high stockings but those hadn't fared the previous day's adventure well.

"Gary says I'm being too harsh on you," she said as she sat down a paper bag near Dean and started taking things out of it. A couple candles - black candles! - some string, a yellow rubber duckie, a beat-up old Barbie doll with all of her clothes and one arm missing, and an incense pot.

"Are you going to lift the curse?" Dean asked,hopefully.

"We'll see." With some chalk she wrote some words around Dean. They looked like some kind of elaborate urban graffiti. The letters were so convoluted they were hard to read, especially when viewed upside down. If he had been standing next to the magic girl he would have recognized the words as "Dean Stinks'"

"Are you going to look up my skirt ever again?" Triana asked.

"I never wanted to in the first place." Dean swore.

Triana didn't look Dean in the face as she set the candles around him in a circle. Gary had asked her why she was being so harsh to Dean, when by all accounts it sounded like an accident. Hank and Dean had fallen into a sinkhole and she had tried to help them get out by hanging over over the sinkhole as far as she could so they could grab her leg and climb up it. Since she was wearing a mini-skirt it was sort of inevitable that it would happen. Triana wasn't sure why that had so ticked her of.

"Gee, I never realized how bony your knees were before," Dean blurted out as she stood up after adding "I am so not into this" in and around the candles. She clenched her teeth and stopped her first impulse, which was to just walk away. Dean's problem was that he was completely clueless and utterly guileless.

"My legs are not bony!" she declared, as if she had not spent hours in front of her mirror decrying out skinny and bony her legs were. She wished she had legs like her former BFF, Kim, smooth, meaty. Legs guys would love to put their hands all over. She didn't actually like the idea of guys putting their hands all over her legs but she liked the idea of them being that attractive. Triana blushed as she recalled that Kim had envied her legs because her thighs didn't rub together when she walked. And when she stood still there was an actual notch between her legs.

"Anyway, my stockings were ruined yesterday so you're going to have to buy me new ones!"

"Sure. Does that mean I get to go shopping with you?"

Triana had long taken it as a matter of principle that boys hated to go shopping with girls. Trust Dean not to be like other boys. "If you do I swear, I'm bringing a purse - and you're going to hold it!" she threatened.

"Ok."

Triana silently groaned. She remembered how her fathered hated it when her mother had left him holding her purse when she tried on new clothes. Why couldn't Dean be more like other boys? Why couldn't she have just told him he couldn't come along in the first place?

"That's assuming I can lift this spell from you," she said. "This is a very complicate spell. I'm not sure I can remove it all by myself. It's going to take a lot of ritual." As she was talking she handed him the rubber duckie. Then taking the barbie doll, she grabbed Dean's swimsuit, yanked the band out and stuff the doll half way in. She set the incense pot in front of Dean, dropped a pellet in it then pointed at it with her finger. A small flame popped into life.

"Is that what you use to cover up the smell of your smoking?" Dean asked, again, tactlessly.

"No." Triana said crossly, "This is to create the proper mood, to open up the mind. to release... Oh, never mind!"

Triana reached into her bag and pulled out a couple of necklaces, one a string of tiny doll's heads, the other plastic chicken's feet. She draped these over the redhead's shoulders.

"If you must know, I use pine-scented furniture polish. A lot of it, Ok? I've got the best polished furniture in the state. But I'm cutting back on the smoking. Really I am."

"Ok," Dean agreed.

Seeing Dean's one empty hand the girl ducked back to her bag and searched around. "We'll need something to balance the chakra's" she muttered and straightened up with a tiny plastic whale which she tucked into his empty hand.

Triana looked into her bag of goodies and pulled out a tin-foil hat. It was folded like origami into a square with twists of foil at each corner pointing up into s little spire. She set that aside and dug around some more and pulled out a spool of speaker wire, and a knife. Dean's eyes widened for a moment at the sign of the knife. Did Triana require his blood to break the spell? When she went to trim the insulation off the end of the spool he visibly relaxed.

"The thing is," Triana was saying as she scrapped varnish off the thin wire, "is that there are guys who have nothing better to do that look up girl's skirts, take pictures and so on."

"That's disgusting," Dean said.

"Exactly. So we women tend to get a little upset when someone gets caught doing that. "

"Of course."

Triana looked to see if Dean was agreeing to be agreeing, but he looked honestly shocked at what she was telling him.

"And especially when someone announces to the world that they looked up their skirt."

"But I didn't announce it to the world," Dean complained. "There was only Hank there and I'm sure he looked up too."

"But he didn't say anything. He didn't embarrass me, OK?" But Dean was shaking his head.

"Look, if you were to see me naked sometime and didn't say anything about it, it would be like it didn't really happen. I wouldn't have felt embarrassed. I would have felt like I had to do something about it."

"Can I?" Dean asked hopefully, "you know, see you naked?"

"No! God, no! Don't even think about it!"

"But you said..."

"No!" Triana glared at him.. "Besides what would your little friend from the mall think if you went around talking about looking up people's skirts and stuff."

"Gloria? She's understand."

Triana snorted.

"Really she would," Dean insisted. "Gloria's very understanding."

"I thought I was an understanding kind of girl,once, too, and look where you ended up." She took the spool of copper wire and poked a hole in the aluminum foil hat, twisting the end together so it make a connection. She unrolled the rest as she walked towards the hanger door, stepped outside and jammed the other end deep into the ground. She came back and jammed the hat on Dean's head.

"Triana, I think you're making thinks worse," Dean said. The little black cloud over his head had always been spitting tiny lightning bolts around his head but now that he was grounded by the copper wire the lightning was striking the hat on a regular basis.

"How much longer is this going to take?" Dean asked after a while.

"Not much longer," Triana reassured him. She looked him over thoughtfully, then pointed her finger at each of the candles circling him (Not set in a pentagram as that would invoke real magic, which she was trying to avoid) and set them aflame. She reached one more time into her bag. "Say cheese," she ordered as she pointed a camera at him.

"What?" Dean said instead, as light exploded from the flash.

"Memories, Dean, precious memories. You keep talking about my panties and I start showing this picture around."

But you haven't made the rain to stop."

"Oh, that." Triana snapped her fingers and the little black cloud disappeared from over Dean's head.

"You could have done that at any time?" he cried, feeling around his head for any last stray bolts of lightning.

"Yeah, but then I'd never have gotten you to sit around dressed like this."

"You're mean, Triana. That was a really mean thing to do."

"That's what Gary said. But I know you, Dean. You can't keep a secret. But I figure if I have a picture like this -" she held up the camera so Dean could see the picture she'd taken- "then maybe you'd think twice about blabbing."

"I keep my word. If I had said I would never say that again, I wouldn't." Dean had dropped the rubber duckie and whale to the floor, pulled the barbie out of his swim suit and added it to the pile. Triana was blowing out the candles and tossing them back into the paper bag. The incense holder she left where it was because it was too hot to touch.

"Look, Dean," she began hesitantly as she pulled in the copper wire and wound it into a spool. "We have to talk."

"Oh, god, why don't you just kill me!" Dean wailed.

"Dean! Dean! It's not that bad."

"Of course it is. I know what it means when a girl says 'we have to talk': You're dumping me!"

"I'm not 'dumping' you. To do that you would have to be my boyfriend, and you're not. Your a boy and a friend, but it was never more than that." That only lead to more wailing and Dean curling up in a fetal position on the lawn chair. It wasn't designed for that and promptly fell over.

"Oh, come on, Dean, stand up and take it like a man!"

"I don't wanna," he whined.

Triana wasn't prepared for dealing with a 19 year old boy having a tantrum like a three year old. "Dean if we don't have this talk you can't go shopping with me," she suggested.

"But you promised," he whined.

"I'll let you buy me a shake?"

"What good's a shake if you're going back to that Raven guy? He's so sensitive, he's so sweet, he's so cripple that I have to help him all the time."

"I'm not going back to Raven. I'm just going back to my mother's to continue my education." Dean's jab about Raven needing her help all the time rankled because that was how shed met him, opening doors for him, holding elevators... He did to seem to need a lot of help, the more so when she was around. Was he playing her?

"But he'll be there." Dean said snapping her back to the present.

"And there are all sorts of girls around here you can met. But I'm not going back for him. I want to learn more magic. I want to learn how to shut out the screams of Venturestein's soul and stuff like there. And I won't be there forever. "

Dean had unfolded himself and was sitting up on the pavement in the hanger, with his head buried in his knees. Against her best intention Triana moved over to sit next to him. She put her arm around his shoulders. "You know I came back because I was having fights with my step-father. I don't imagine those will get any better. So I told Mom that I'll come back to her house but I plan to return here every once a month or so, so I won't have to fight so much with the Out-rider. So we'll be seeing each other from time to time."

"Cool!" Dean said excitedly. A little too excitedly.

"But Dean, remember, I'm not really a Venture. I'm not cut out for a life like this. It scares the crap out of me every time I see the Monarch's Cocoon floating overhead."

"Me, too," Dean said. "I guess I'm not much of a Venture either."

"And conversely, you're not magic and I am. There's a lot of stuff that goes on there that non-magic people don't understand. And which, frankly I wish I weren't involved in, but just being magic involves me in them. So I need to get trained to survive. Its like how you and your brother got out of that pit yesterday. I would never have thought of that. And I would never have been able to do something like that. You guys are kind of incredible. I'm glad to have met you, Dean. But we're parts of different worlds now and ..." Triana wasn't sure how to end that. There was a lot of crap in what she was saying but some of it was true. Some of it had been said just to make Dean feel better. If what she felt towards Dean had been love she could have found some way to make it work out. She was young enough to love in the power of love.

Triana looked at her watch. "There's a couple hours before the stores close. What say I get my purse, you get dressed and we looked for some stockings for these "bony" knees of mine?"

[]

The minion came in wearing a cheap version of a tuxedo and proceeded to lay bowls of salad at the two setting on the long table. He was so nervous that he might accidentally drop something and be killed on the spot that he almost dropped something. He recovered and left quickly to prepare the second course.

The Monarch, sitting at the head of the long table smiled mysteriously at his lovely wife, sitting on his right. She refused to sit at the other end of the table since it was almost impossible to hear what the other was saying without shouting. She had made it very clear she wasn't going to shout at her husband during supper. She and the Monarch were taking a short respite from the Cocoon. Dr. Mrs The Monarch wanted to do some shopping and laze around the swimming pool of their house in the gated community of Malice. While her husband was smiling mysteriously, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch was planning her evening which at the moment consisted of a long hot bath followed by some serious boning of her husband.

After some time the tuxedo dressed minion returned and swept away the salad bowls before setting out plates of soup. Dr. Mrs. The Monarch was surprised that half the Monarch's salad was uneaten. Usually he stuffed the salad away the way a horse eats hay; a legacy from his summer living with the Monarch Butterflies of the New Jersey marshes. That he hadn't eaten all his salad meant he was consumed with something to tell her. With a sigh Dr. Mrs. the Monarch dismissed thoughts of a long bath and more fun later. Whatever news it was, was going to reshape the night's activities. She schooled herself in patience as the Monarch took half way through the soup (French Onion) before breaking his news.

"Pookines, remember how hard we've been looking for a new Harmonic Resonating Defractionalinzator for the 5th gear, ascension helical core?"

She didn't actually recall him ever interesting himself with the ins and outs of the Cocoon's flight mechanism but was very impressed that he had memorized the name of one of the more obscure parts of it. It was instantly obvious to her that he had found the part but she forestalled stepping on his story. This was the Monarch's story. He got kind of cranky when anyone jumped to the conclusion ahead of him. "That piece is nearly impossible to find!" she said, which was true enough.

"Well, I found one!" The Monarch declared.

"No! Where?"

"It came to me recently that the Flying Squidthulhu used an Harmonic Resonating Defractionalinzator in his flying rig."

"But didn't the Flying Squidthulhu disappear years ago."

"Indeed, my sweet. He disappeared while attacking Mr. Impossible. You see, he made one tiny little error in his plan for attacking Mr. Impossible."

"What was that," Dr. Mrs. the Monarch asked in her gravelly voice.

"He attacked Mr. Impossible!"

"I never liked that man,"

"Who? Mr. Impossible? The man's a conceited jackass."

"No, Squidthulhu. He had all those tentacles coming out of his shoulders and they were always slithering around into places they don't belong. Uggh! A girl couldn't talk to him for more than five minutes without feeling violated! He tried to steal my bra out from under my clothes while talking to me." The look that came into the Monarch's eyes hinted that supper might be interrupted. "He might have gotten away with it, too. Only I wasn't wearing a bra at the time."

"I recall getting you bra - and the rest of your clothes - within minutes of meeting you!"

"You weren't cold like a dead fish."

"And never will be! Squidthulhu probably did something inappropriate with Sally Impossible..." The Monarch said. "Hence the fatal confrontation with that withering mass of elastic flesh!"

"And you found his flying harness?"

"Indeed I did sweetums." The Monarch picked up a small bell by his plate and rang it. The Minion came running, in a panic that he was late clearing off the soup course. He seized the bowls of soup and ran, juices flying. He was back seconds later with two plates containing steaks, some corn and a medium size baked potato. He slipped on the spilled soup, spun around, smashed against a wall, recovered and dropped the plates in front of the two Arches. He pulled himself erect, bowed in the direction of the Monarch and limped away.

"It's so hard to get good help, " the Monarch sighed.

"Are you kidding? That was comedy gold. If I thought he could do that again without dropping a plate I'd suggestion him for the annual Cocoon Christmas party."

"Or maybe he could drop bowls of hot soup onto Dr. Venture's lap!" The Monarch suggested. half-heartedly.

"What about the flying harness?" Dr. Mrs The Monarch prompted.

But instead of answering her the Monarch dug into his steak, cutting off a corner and popping it into his mouth. As he chewed his closed his eyes and sighed. "Ah. Perfect. This has the taste of victory all over it."

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch waited until he had swallowed before reminding hm, "The Harmonic Resonating Defractionalinzator?" She wasn't going to let him make her waiting until dessert to finish his announcement.

"Eh?" He was savoring another cut of his steak, wafting it under his nose like it was a wine or something. "It was surprisingly simple once I set my mind to it. The last date that Squidthulhu was known to be alive was April 12th. He was known to be hiding out in Mexico at the time. And who should be cross the US at the time but Mr. Impossible, doing a victory lap after driving those space aliens off Hawaii. April 12th he was supposed to stop in Denver to open some hospital, but he begs off, said he had an old friend he needed to see in New Mexico. And the rest was that old math question about train 'A' leaving the station at 'Y' and traveling 'Z' speeds per hour and another train heading right for it. Knowing the relative speeds of the two flying machines I calculated where they must have fought and searched the area. Last night the minions reported finding Squidthulhu's skeleton. Or what passes for a skeleton in a humanoid squid. I told them to bring back the flying harness. We should have the Cocoon operational again by tomorrow!"

"And the assault on the Ventures?"

"The Monarch smiled. "You so know my mind. I thought we could sort that out tonight. Then maybe a little victory celebration, if you know what I mean." He arched his massively long eyebrows suggestively.

"And you know my mind," she whispered.


	15. Chapter 15

"Hey, Gary, it's me," Triana Orpheus called from the edge of the open door to the guard shack Gary called home.

"He looked up from what he was doing and nodded to the purple-haired girl. "What's up?"

"I wondered if I could - is that a gun?" the girl stopped speaking with a little shudder.

"Technically yes, but it's just a little .22 automatic. it hardly counts as one."

"I'm sorry, I just never liked being around guns," Triana had a shopping bag in her hand, which she sat down on the counter near her. The guard shack was small, square, with a large window looking down onto the highway running in front of Venture Enterprises. To one side were a large collection of monitors connected to remote camera mounted around the compound. There was a recliner positioned in front of the monitors. But around the rest of the small room were floor mounted cabinets filled with a mixture of large and small drawers and swing-out doors for storage spaces. A counter covered the cabinets. There counter was cluttered with stuff all long the length of three walls. Gary had cleared a small space which he lined with old newspapers where he was cleaning and oiling a small gun.

Triana was overcoming her initial revulsion and looked over the burly security officer's shoulder at the gun laid out there. "Why did you say this hardly counts as a gun?" she asked.

"It's a .22 short, barely has any stopping power. It's Ok for squirrels and such but if you're trying to bring a man down you need something bigger, a .38 or a .45."

"You mean it won't hurt anybody?" Triana wondered.

"Eh! I've killed a guy with a Nerf gun," Gary said, then regretted it as it caused Triana to step back and pale. "Sorry. Ijust meant that anything can be lethal is used the right way. Sure, getting shot with a .22 is going to hurt a lot, and you're going to bleed, a lot, but unless you get shot in a vital area it's not going to slow down a very determined man."

"Then why do you have it, if it's so ..."

"Non-lethal?" Gary supplied. "Intimidation. "Most people don't realize how weak a .22 is. They just see a gun being pointed at them and think they're going to die. That's really all I need it for." As he was speaking he was fitting parts back together. In seconds he had the automatic re-assembled. he bent over and slipped into the harness clipped to his ankle.

Grabbing a shop towel he began wiping his hands. "So what can I do for you?" he asked.

"I was hoping I could stash this here until I come back next month." she said touching the bag she'd set on the counter.

Gary pulled the bag over and peered into it. Shaking his head he said, "Going home to your mom, huh. That's a lot of cigarettes."

"I don't want Dad finding them while I'm back at school."

"You know, if this were pot I'm be honored to hold it for you, but cigarettes... And you're buying them in cartons now..."

"I met this guy... "

"Selling out of the back of his trunk,"

"Yeah, How did you know?"" Triana seemed surprised that Gary knew about that.

The bodyguard took one of the cartons out of the bag and turned it around in his hands, inspecting it. "No state excise stamp," he noted.

"What?" Triana looked confused.

"It's illegal to sell cigarettes in this state that don't have an excise stamp on them, shows that the tax has been paid. Tax is like three-four dollars a pack now. Ten packs in a carton that comes to, what, a thirty dollar discount?"

"Twenty," Triana replied slowly realizing she'd been ripped off.

"What were you going to do if I said 'no'?"

"Come on, Gary, be a pal."

"I just hate having you turn out like my mother," Gary said. "She smokes constantly, looks like she's 90 and sound like she's a thousand. That's all." Ten years as a henchman had left Gary with little ability to express any kind of affection aside from the butt-slapping, towel-snapping jock kind. He wanted to say 'I care about you' but henchmen aren't allowed to care about others. It had been easy telling Kim that he loved her because that was a simple and direct emotion, but his feeling about the sorcerer's daughter were too subtle.

Gary got up and opened a few drawers until he found an empty one and stuffed the bag of cigarettes, bag and all, into the drawer.

"Have you told Dean that you're going back?" he asked.

Triana nodded.

"How did he take it?"

"With a lot of crying and whining."

"You did mention that you would be coming back in a month?"

"In one ear and out the other."

"Look - uh - I've kind of got you a little going away present." Gary opened a draw near him and pulled out a small pharmacy bag and handed it to the girl.

"You shouldn't have," she began as she opened the bag and pulled out the small box inside. "What the hell kind of crap is this!" she exploded, throwing the box at Gary. "Nicoderm patches? OK, I smoke, maybe I smoke more than you'd like but it's my life and I'll do whatever I want with it. I don't need you - mother - to tell me what to do."

She spun on her heels to stalk away but he caught one of her arms with a lightning like movement. "Triana listen to me," he said.

"Let go of me," she squawked at the same time.

Finding that she couldn't even more his arm at the moment Triana stopped struggling but she was visibly seething.

"I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life. That wasn't what this was all about." Gary had picked up the box of nicotine abatement patches and put it in her hand, closing her fingers around it. "But I know something about nicotine addiction. Do you honestly think you can go back to your mother's house and stop smoking cold turkey, do you? I've seen guys in the Cocoon try to stop smoking. They needed help. You're going to need help."

Triana looked at the box shoved into her hand. "So this isn't some kind of gross joke on your part?"

"I'll save the gross jokes for when you come back. Maybe leave a picture of a smoker's lung in one of the packs," Gary said lightly, trying to smile.

Triana wasn't mollified. "Now I've got something else to hide. What if my mom finds these? Then what?"

"Hide them someplace where she won't look, an old tampon box or something. Nobody looks in there, it's too private."

"How do you know about stuff like that?" Triana wanted to know.

"Years as Dr. Girlfriend's errand boy for all her feminine hygiene needs. I know way too much about those things. Oh, and if you do use those things, be sure to get rid of the old patches so they won't get found."

"Oh, yeah. Good idea," she said. There was an awkward silence. "You know what Dean told me last night," she said to be saying something. "I made him come with me to buy new stocking, thinking to humiliate him a little."

"That's not going to work," Gary said, "the boy's incapable of being embarrassed by stuff he doesn't understand," then waited for her to go on with her story.

"Anyway he was saying that his friend, that girl, Gloria? has been trying to talk him into putting on a convention for those books he reads all the time, Giant Boy Detective. Can you imagine that. Who would want to come to a convention about an old boy's book series that no one reads anymore."

Gary, who had a longer and more personal contact with nerds, collectors and fans, smiled kindly. "You never know. If the books are still in print someone must be reading them."

"I guess, but can you imagine Dean organizing anything, let alone a convention?" She stopped and thought about how Hank and Dean had worked together the day before to get out of the pit they'd fallen into. She realized that Dean had a lot more resolve then she generally gave him credit for. "Well, whatever," she added, then realizing that there was nothing more to say, pushed up from the counter she had been leaning against. "I'll let you get back to your work," she said, picking up the box of nicotine patches. "Thanks for the - ah - going away gift, I guess. The Outrider offered to pick me up tomorrow but I decided to catch a bus instead." impulsively she leaned over and kissed Gary on the cheek, then skipped to the door. She paused there to add, "If you hear anything from Kim be sure to call me."

"You'll be the first. And vice verse, alright?"

""Right." She smiled and for once looked happy. She ducked out the door.

"Gary!" she called a second later. "You'd better come here!"

As he stepped out the door she pointed to the moon rising in the North. Only it wasn't the Moon, it was the Cocoon floating eerily in the sky. Lights circled the lower portion of the Cocoon where the propulsion motors were located.

"What are we going to do?" Triana breathed.

" 'We' aren't going to do anything. You are going straight to your father's residence and button down. I'm gong to alert the Ventures then deal with this," Gary told her.

"But I can help. You can't take on the whole Cocoon by yourself."

"No, go! If you stay here and fight the Monarch you will be fighting the Monarch for the rest of your life. You help tonight and you're declaring yourself part of these games, and there's no getting out once you're in. Go, keep your head down. Stay out of it. They will respect that. You have enough to deal with being a magic user. You said so yourself. Don't get mixed up with the Guild as well."

"But you'll be killed!"

Gary was silent for a moment. That was something he had tried not to think about. The odds of him taking out a full-scale assault on the Ventures was pretty slim. But what could he do? He was a henchman. A henchman for the OSI, maybe, but still one of the little people whose lives didn't matter in the greater scheme of things. Facing the real possibility of dying, he wasn't thrilled by the idea but he didn't know what else he could do. And he couldn't tell Triana how he felt because then she'd insist on staying. Even though she wasn't part of his job he was as determined to keep her alive as he was the Ventures.

"That's not your concern," he said roughly, "Now get the hell out of here!" he shoved her hard towards her father's residence. She stumbled, nearly fell, scrambled back on her feet and looked back at the bodyguard. he was already back in the guard shack. The lights were off. He was doing whatever it was he had to. She suddenly realized that for all the fun they had had together, the easy comradery all this time, she had never been a part of his world, this world. With an oath she scrambled across the lawns of the Venture Compound to the building her father called home.

[]

Gary dashed back into the guard shack and pick up his "Little Slugger" baseball bat and a square of fine mesh cloth before jogging towards the main buildings of the Venture compound. As he race he wondered if Kim would have been as concerned about his potential death as Triana had been. He would like think so, but maybe she was already too far into the game of heroes and villains, too immured to people she knew dying?

He came up to the outside door to the small lab that fronted the exit to the Panic Room. The door was smashed to pieces. It had been destroyed during his fight with Kim when she was trying to kill Hank Venture. He should have fixed it before this but it reminded him too much of his girlfriend, the room beyond was a shambles, too, large splotches of blood still lay on the floor, some of it his, most of it hers. And of course the door to the panic room was broken, too. All things he should have fixed before this if he hadn't been blubbering about his lost love. Sizing up the situation he decided to make his stand just inside the outer door. That would still limit the number of minions who could come at him at one time.

Noise in the Panic Room made him look up. Hank and Dean were lifting the Panic Room door off the floor and shoving it into the doorway. It wedged against the door frame. They started piling any sort of crap they could find in the room against the door to prevent the Monarch's minions for breaking through. With luck it might hold for ten or fifteen minutes. Dr. Venture was behind the boys, giving directions but not bothering to lift anything himself. Seeing Gary looking at them Dr. Venture pointed his finger at the bodyguard and shouted "I expect to you to fix this door first thing in the morning!"

"If there is a morning," Gary thought to himself, turned around and went outside. This might be a better idea, he decided. The minion still could only come at him from in front and then he's have the lab to retreat to when their numbers got too high. Oh, to be a Jedi now, with mind powers and a real, working lightsaber.

In the distance he saw the Cocoon near the ground. A door opened in its side and dozens of minions leaped out into the air, gliding to the ground on their butterfly wings. A maneuver he taught them when he had been General 21, running the Cocoon under the Monarch's direction. The discipline wasn't as sharp as it could have been but he wasn't there anymore to keep the henchmen in line.

Someone remaining in the open door fired a number of flares into the sky, lighting the grounds ahead of ther minions. One of the flares malfunctioned, spinning off to the right and smacking into the side of the hanger for the X-1. It exploded with a dull boom and a large splash of fire on the side of the building. "Oh, great," Gary thought, something else I'll have to fix in the morning," forgetting for the moment that come morning he probably wouldn't be around to fix anything.

Waiting for them to race across the grounds from the Cocoon to where he awaited them was the longest two minutes in his life. He extended his knife-claws, flexed his shoulders to loosen the muscles and took practice swings with the bat.

The henchmen stopped about fifty feet from where Gary stood and unslung their dart guns from their shoulders. The darts were coated with an anesthetic drug that would knock out whose got pricked by the point. As they lined up to shoot at the bodyguard Gary shook out the sheet of fabric he had brought from the guard shack. He flung it in front of him as the first salvo of darts arrived. The projectiles got tangled in the mesh of the heavy fabric. Gary was taking a risk since his arm was still exposed holding up the fabric but it seemed safe enough since he expected them all to be aiming for his chest.

The cloth shuddered and twitched for a bit. As it settled down he heard a repeated roar from the henchmen, and flung away the sheet. The henchmen were charging him. He laid out the first few with the bat. A stinging backblow that left them flopping in their tracks. The next couple guys got a bellyful of steel from his extendo-claws. The action got a little more confused after that. The front row of minions were being forced forward by those in the back. It became hard to swing his bat, there was no room. He dropped it at last and began slashing with his other extendo-knife.

As the press got worse, Gary took a step back, placing himself in the empty door frame. he had less mobility there but the minions were even more limited. For a couple minutes he held his ground there. He wished he had his bat again since he now had room to swing it again, but there was no chance of retrieving it.

He was beginning to think he might actually survive the assault but he heard someone sing out "Head's up!" And over the heads of the minions in front of him sailed one of the corpses he had left while fighting outside. It hurtled right at him, coming too fast for him to dodge.

He sprang to the side, staying out from under the corpse's dead weight but that opened up the doorway and a stream of minion poured through. Gary was still struggling to his feet when someone grabbed his arm and held on to it tightly. He was trying to shake them off when another minion landed on his other arm. He screamed since he landed first on the extendo-knife, but his body immobilized that arm as well. Gary was so busy trying to get one or the other arms free that he never saw the boot coming that connected with his chin and exploded his head with flashes of light and extreme pain. A boot to the stomach and another to the kidneys left his limp, barely conscious. He head a voice order, "tie him up. The boss wants to deal with him special. You four, stay here and don't let the Ventures get out of their cage. We've got them right where the boss wants them!" The voice, Gary was guessing it was 15, the new commander of the minion, paused to laugh. No one else joined in. He could feel his arms being jerked behind his back and ropes twisted around them. Some arms tried to pick him up. he kicked out with his feet, just out of sheer cussedness, and got dropped to the concrete floor for his efforts. His head bounced off the cement and he lost consciousness.

[]

"Wake up and face the wrath of your lord and master," a voice said just before someone slapped him hard in the face. Gary opened a puffy eye. The other was already swollen shut.

Gary wanted to say something cutting and pithy but found himself too busy swallowing the blood in his mouth. And the moment passed.

"No one quits the Monarch and gets away with it!" The Monarch declared. He poised to slap Gary again in the face but seeing his former henchman staring him in the face desisted. "Soon, all too soon, you will feel the agony, the terror, the sheer of horror of your wickedness," the monarch declared instead, and continued with a long and rambling tirade.

"Just kill me and get it over with," Gary finally interrupted. "If I have to listen to your whining for another minutes I think my head is going to explode. God, how I hate your rants. They're so...stupid. You're so stupid. You have all this money and all you can think about is killing some has-been scientist. And you can't even do that! You're pathetic."

"Pathetic am I?" the Monarch screamed. "I'll show you pathetic!" He pointed his wrist at the former henchman but before he could unleash a fatal dart from his wrist cuff, his wife spoke from her throne, "wait!"

"What?" the Monarch asked petulantly.

"Can't you see, he's trying to goad you into killing him quickly. A traitor like 21 should be killed slowly, painfully, as an object lesson to the other minions."

Gary focused his one working eye on the Queen of the Cocoon. Her face was twisted in disgust and anger. Despite the fact that it was her sexual teasing and innuendo that had broken his heart and caused him to break away from the Monarch, Gary often had the thought that she had real feeling for him. But now, tonight, it did not look as if she had any thought except for the destruction of one Gary Fuu.

"Long and slow, yes!" the Monarch gloated. Then looked puzzled as he tried to think of an sufficiently painful form of death.

Gary looked around. He was in the throne room of the Cocoon. he must have been dragged here while unconscious. His arms were tied behind his back but his feet were free. Minions on either side were holding on to his tied arms. Another two were standing next to him with dart guns at the ready. Another six or eight minions were scattered around the large room as well as the dozen or so techs working the controls at the moment. Even if he could throw off the guards holding him it didn't seem at all likely that he could escape.

Still, a man could try. The Monarch had started pacing as he considered one idea after another. Some, like slow roasting over a fire even the Guild banned while others just seemed insufficiently cruel. But as he paced the minion's eyes followed him. By training they were ever attentive to his needs. The more attention they paid to the Monarch the less they paid to him. He waited until the Monarch had walked again to the far end of the room, then, just before he turned around Gary lunged to one side. He forced the minion on that side to stagger, a sharp twist and he wrested himself out of the man's grasp. The minion on his other arm was trying to pull him back into place, Gary let the man pull, then added his own strength, head-butting the guy as they closed in. Lightning seared through his head with the impact. Don't do that again, he told himself. But the minion went down. He swept one leg out and tripped one of the minions holding a dart gun. As he went down, he bumped into the other minion, slicing at him with the extendo-knives still strapped to his arms bounded behind his back.

The Monarch was shouting commands to the remaining minion. Dr. Mrs The Monarch had gotten out of her seat and stepped down a tier or two looking concerned. She almost never fought in fights like these but Gary knew she was a formidable opponent.

The other minions were bunched by the door. Gary plowed into them like a bowling ball,sending them flying. His size, bulk and conditioning simply overwhelmed their numbers. He burst through the doors into the corridor outside the throne room and started for the main hatch. He had to get to it before the Monarch thought to tell the minions there to close the door. At the same time he was looking for something to cut loose the ropes binding him, a knife or a shard of glass, even a torn bit of metal might have worked but none presented themselves.

From the corridor he exploded into the staging area by the main hatch. The room was empty and no one seemed to operating the controls to close the door. His heart leaped at the thought that he would be able to survive this.

"Hey!" someone behind him shouted. And a heavy weight fell on his back. Gary tucked into a roll as the added weight carried him to the floor, He hoped that he could roll free of this new complication but that minion clung to him tenaciously. Without his arms to help him Gary was unable to put up much of a fight. The door, the ramp to the ground was so tantalizingly close. He kept humping his way closer to the door, dragging the minion with him but he just wasn't making enough progress. For a moment he was rolled on his back and drew his knee up into a kick that finally pushed the man off but as Gary scrambled to his feet, the door from the corridor burst open and a full dozen minion piled through. He was nearly to the ramp when they fell upon him and dragged him down. Someone started beating his head on the floor and Gary lost interest in his surroundings.


	16. Chapter 16

"Throw a bucket of water on him," he heard Dr. Mrs. the Monarch say as he slowly regained consciousness. A moment later a small amount of ice-cold glass splashed on his face.

"I said a bucket!" Dr. Mrs. the Monarch said, "Not a glass of water."

Gary shook his head, causing everything around him to swirl and blur. "It's OK," he mumbled. His other eye was starting to close but he could still see well enough to tell that he had been returned to the throne room. Once again held in place by two minions holding his arms.

"Have fun?" The Monarch asked from near his left. He heaved his head in that direction, simply turning it was too much of a challenge. Gary was tempted to reply but found his mouth, his tongue, his lips so bruised and swollen that he doubted his ability to speak at all.

"This!" the Monarch proclaimed, holding up a syringe, "shall be your doom!" He laughed. "Say hello to your good friend Dr. Curare! If I've got my dosages right this will leave you living and breathing but unable to move. You will have a ringside seat on my revenge on Dr. Venture and his yapping sons, and then slowly you will starve to death, unable to eat or drink even thought you will be surrounded with fresh food every day of the rest of your short but miserable life! That will be the penalty for deserting your master!"

The Monarch plunged the needle of the syringe into the vial of curare and carefully withdrew a small volume. He handed off the vial to a minion and slowly pressed the plunger until a single drop appeared at the tip of the needle.

"Any final words you'd like to share while you still have the to ability to speak?"

Gary struggled against the two minions but they were holding on too tightly. With his hands bound behind him, his leverage was limited. He was too focused on avoiding the needle to come up with any final epitaph. As the Monarch advanced on him Gary tried to step back, forcing the minions to retreat slightly.

"Bare his arm," the Monarch ordered the minion holding the vial. The minion passed the vial to another minion before reaching into pocket to pull out a knife and cut away part of Gary's left sleeve.

"Swab" the Monarch continued.

The minion put the knife away, took out an alcohol swab and tore the packet open, handing the moist gauze to the Monarch.

"I don't know why I bother," the Monarch said conversationally, as he wiped down an area of Gary's arm. "Here I am about to give you an inject that will kill you eventually, and I'm worried that you might get an infection. Well, life is full of pointless gestures." He gripped Gary's arm, steadying it. "Hold him tight," he told the minions.

And then the door behind them crashed open. "Master! I home!"

"What the hell is that thing?" The Monarch shouted. "Kill it! kill it!"

Venturestein lurched into the room, brushed past the henchmen milling around the door and stumbled towards the Monarch. Henchmen fired round after round of their medicated darts at the mismatched creature, covering his chest with yellow tufts. They waited for him to fall but he just kept on moving. The Monarch took a step or two back as the creature approached, the syringe in his hand forgotten.

Texas threw his long arms around the Monarch and cried, "Home! At last - home!"

"Get it off! Get it off! Get it off" the Monarch screamed, trying to wrench himself free of the creature's embrace. Gary hoped that the men holding him would be the first to respond but they stood fast, holding him tight. The flanking men slung their dart guns over their shoulders and leaped to the Monarch's aid, tearing at the resurrected minion, only to be thrown back by a blow from the creature's arm. One man fell against the minion holding the vial of curare, knocking him over. The little glass vial hit the floor with a sharp crack, shattering, spilling the lethal fluid in a small puddle which he then fell into. The minion scrambled to get out of the liquid but stopped when he felt something sharp jabbed into his cheek. He pulled out a sliver of the bottle and looked at it with horrified eyes. "Oh Shi-" he began but the curare was already having an effect and his scream endings with a drawn out hiss like a deflating tire. He stopped moving, not necessarily dead, but so paralyzed that death would come soon and as a relief.

A couple more henchmen had to join in before finally they could wrest the creature away from the Monarch.

"Ah-h-h! He drooled on me!" the Monarch shouted in disgust. "I feel horribly slimed." He brushed at his costume then wrinkled his long, thin nose. "Minions! Throw that thing in the brig. I'll deal with it when I've had a chance to clean up." He turned to go and noticed Gary still bound and being held the two minions. "Throw him in with the monster. Maybe it will tear him to shreds and save me the trouble!" The Monarch turned and stalked from the room.

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, co-ruler of the Cocoon since her marriage to the Monarch had been sitting quietly through all this, letting her husband have his way. As the Monarch left she stood up, but only to issue commands. "Lock those two away. Move it! We still have a lot to do tonight!"

[]

The brig was a small room down the corridor outside the throne room. It was about twelve feet by twelve feet and nine feet high. There were no fixtures or furnishings in the room, but it had a stout lock on the door accessible only from the outside. Like most of the Cocoon, the floor, walls and ceilings were made from light metal sheets riveted to the Cocoon's metal framework. Gary tripped over his feet as he was thrown into the room and skidded across the floor before piling up against the far wall. His head hit with a crack that brought more pain to the burly former minion. When his head cleared a few moments later he rolled around until he was more or less sitting up. Texas stood looking at the closed door with a confused expression on his face.

"I don't think they like us," Gary said.

"Why mad us?" the resurrected man rumbled. "I just want come home?"

"Like I said, Texas, this isn't your home anymore. They don't recognize you." Gary was struggling with the rope tying his hands together. He couldn't quite get his fingers on it, or bring one of his extendo-claws around. He was surprised that they hadn't removed the retractable knives. Perhaps the minions simply hadn't had time to get around to that, or maybe they were afraid to get close enough to their former comrade to take them off.

After a bit he gave up and rested. Looking at Texas, who was trying to push the door open, he was struck by the carpet of anesthetizing darts in the creature's chest. "Texas," he inquired, "are you feeling at all weak or tired, maybe a little sleepy?"

The misshapen man looked down at the darts. "They gave me butterflies," he told Gary proudly.

"Really?" Then seeing the syringe meant for him sticking out of Texas' chest as well, he asked, "No feeling of numbness, stiffness, no ..." he couldn't think of a third thing to ask.

"No."

Gary had no idea what Dr. Venture had done to resurrect Venturestein but apparently it had left him immune to even massive amounts of poisons.

"Hey, Texas," he called, "Can you untie these ropes?"

The creature walked behind Gary and started fumbling with the ropes tying his hands together. Gary couldn't tell what Venturestein was doing but after a bit he got the feeling that rope-untying was among the skills lost when Texas had first died. He suddenly started tugging at the ropes, as if he were trying to break them. Pain lanced up Gary's arm as the ropes bit into his flesh. "Hey, wait! Wait! Wait!" he hollered "Those ropes are made of nylon. They're not going to break!" but the creature just kept on pulling on the cords. Just as Gary was sure his hands were going to be torn from his arms there was a pop and his hands fell free.

Relief as being free was countered by an immense wave of pain that rose up his arms, spread across his shoulders and took his breath away. He tried flexing his arms, opening and closing his hands but they, at most, twitched.

After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a minute at most, he tried flexing his hands again and found them - weakly - responding. Painfully, he pushed himself to his feet and touched the retraction button on his extendo-claws, pulling them back into their sheaths and out of the way of his hands. With one hand pressed against the wall for support, Gary took a circuit of their prison. By the time he had finished the short trip he was beginning to feel better. He brushed the blood away from his swollen eye and found that he could open it a little, getting him binocular vision again, somewhat.

They couldn't stay here. The Monarch would be done changing clothes soon. Even if he paused to shower off the sweat from Texas if wouldn't be that long before he was back with some new way of killing them. And what had Dr. Mrs. the Monarch sent off the minions to do while he was away?

Gary leaned against the wall while trying to remember every thing he could about the brig. It would take a can opener to get to the lock from inside the brig, and even then there were probably guards posted outside the door. So even if they could get the door open they wouldn't be able to get far. If they had a can opener.

Gary flicked one if his extendo-claws out and looked at it. It was made of the best hardened knife steel, razor sharp, with a needle point. He did have a can-opener of sorts. Maybe luck was turning their way. And then he remembered something else. The floor was made of heavy sheets of steel so it could support the weight of the equipment stacked on it. The walls were of a lighter gauge. Stout enough to resist any concerted effort by prisoners to break through. But the ceiling was relatively thin because it was thought to be too high for anyone to get at.

"Give me a boost up," he told the patchwork man.

He expected to climb up onto Texas's shoulders but the patchwork man laced his fingers together and lifted Gary to the ceiling with no visible sign of effort. He tapped around for a moment to find where the girders were, then jabbed his claw into the void between them. Venturestein staggered for a moment at the impact but the knife went through. Gary pulled down and along with his blade, cutting the sheet metal apart. It was only a few inches but he repeated the sawing motion again and again until he he an X-shaped cut big enough to get his big shoulders through. He bent back the metal, lifted his arms through and pulled himself up into the crawlspace between floors. He stretched out on the floor and held his arm down for Texas.

The resurrected minion looked up at him with confusion. "I home," he insisted.

"This isn't your home anymore. The Venture Compound is your new home. These people are trying to kill you!"

"Home?" Texas repeated.

"Get up here!" Gary ordered using a bit of the command voice he had developed as "General 21." That seemed to decide the matter, Texas took hold of Gary's hand and pulled himself into the crawlspace as well.

"This way," Gary said, leading the way. The crawlspace was a three foot high interfloor area of pipes and wires carrying air, water and electricity around the Cocoon. There were small water service lines, larger drains, bulky air ducts, bundles of wire and the occasional pump, reservoir or transformer. The pipes and ducts tended to be laid out in a formal grid. Gary lead them down on alley between pipes, crawled over some at a point he guessed at, then down another alleyway. Eventually they came to a curved wall blocking the way. Set into the wall was a hatch, locked with a wheeled clamp and gasketed around the rim. Gary turned the wheel and pulled the hatch back. He looked outside for a moment then pulled his head back in.

"This is a service port for working on the outside of the Cocoon," he explained. We're about twenty feet above the ground. Hang on the bottom of the hatch and let yourself down as far as you can before dropping. Remember to tuck into a roll when you land to break your fall." He crawled through the hatch, feet first, hands gripping the bottom edge of the hatch. He let go with a cry of "shit," landing a second later with a painful grunt.

"Texas, come on," he ordered, and the ex-minion wiggled through the hatch and landed next to him. Gary started jogging towards the main building. Venturestein followed behind.

[]

"Nuts!" Gary growled as he jogged in through the broken outside door near the Panic Room. He could see in a glance that the unrepaired door to the Panic Room had been pushed in. The piles of stuff seeking to keep the door in place have been pushed aside as well. There was no one in the Panic Room, just a lot of disorder, a few drops of blood. Gary suddenly realized what Dr. Mrs. The monarch had meant when she had told the minions there was still work to do. Work as in digging out the Ventures and dragging them off to the Cocoon!

And he had just gotten out of the place alive. Now he would have to go back in and try to free the old man and the boys. "You," he said, pointing at Venturestein, "Stay. I need you to - ah - defend the home front. Don't let anyone come in here, Ok?"

"'kay," the patchwork man replied.

Gary started jogging, not to the Cocoon but to his guard shack.

The first thing he did was swallow a handful of aspirin and wrap a cold towel around his swollen eye. He was going to need all the vision he could get out of it if he hoped to survive this assault on the Cocoon. He went around opening cabinet doors until he found the box of fireworks he wanted. The limitations imposed on him by the OSI and Dr. Venture's limited budget meant he would have to improvise weaponry.

He sorted through the box, finding a half-dozen M-80s and another half-dozen smoke bombs. He grabbed up a handful of spinners and stuck a punk stick behind his ear. Before distributing the fireworks into various pants pockets he carefully trimmed the fuses on the fireworks to give him at most a one second lead time before the thing exploded. There was a risk of blowing his hand off doing that but he needed fireworks that would go off almost as soon as he lit them.

He was going through the door when he remembered one thing more and went back to get it, a small collapsible grapple and a length of clothesline. He didn't have time to cover his face and hands in carbon black. He would just have to take the chance that a sentry might spot his white face running across the field.

Luck was with him as he got to the base of the Cocoon without any alarms being set off. He crept around the side until he found the open hatch there he and Texas had escape only moments before. He threw the grapple through the open hatch, getting a secure bite with the second cast. He had knotted the clothesline every four feet and he needed each and every knot to hold on to as he hoisted himself up to the work hatch. He lay panting for breath for a moment than forced himself to move on.

Gary moved around the pipes and wires of the crawl space until he reached a space that, if he remembered the layout of the Cocoon correctly, was directly over a restroom next to the throne room. He extended one of his knives and jabbed through the sheet metal covering the ceiling. He had a lot more leverage up here and quickly ripped open a seam in the metal large enough for him to drop through. He dropped to the floor, grateful that no one had had to visit the "little boy's room" while he was breaking in.

He pushed open the door a crack and looked around. No one was there except for one henchman at the communications desk. The one desk that was always manned no matter what else was happening n the Cocoon. Gary wondered where everyone had gone. If it had stripped the Throne room of the usual dozen men at the consoles it must be a Cocoon wide event, something like the Monarch slowly and finally killing the Ventures. But where?

Gary slipped through the door and quietly snuck up on the minion at the communications desk. The first the man knew that he wasn't alone was when a sharp steel blade encircled his neck and a husky voice whispered in his ear, "where is everybody?"

"Oh, shit," whispered the minion.

"Your stained uniform will be the least of your worried if you don't tell me where the Monarch and the Ventures are," Gary whispered back. He had always wanted to talk like that, soft, deadly, all menace like stuff he'd seem on the movie screen. It was probably just as well that he wasn't distracted by realizing that he was talking the way he had always wanted to.

The minion was only vaguely aware of the circle of wet foulness he was sitting in. The blade under his throat swallowed up every other concern.

"Where?" Gary prompted.

"Number 2 training room," the minion stammered.

"Good," Gary told him. "I'd ask you to keep quiet about this but that would never happen so - look at the birdie!"

With his off hand he pointed away across the Throne room. With his other hand Gary raised another little slugger baseball bat and cracked the minion over the head. He paused long enough to tell if the minion still had a pulse before heading downstairs to the training room.

Gary ran from the Throne Room, pausing only to look out the door for random henchmen before running down the corridor, around the corner of a cross way and finally to a set of stairs to the lower level. He kept expecting to run into someone but the hall, the entire Cocoon seemed empty. Even outside the doors to the training room were no guards posted, not even the random truant minion. Gary wasn't entirely happy about that. It meant a lot more people he would have to fight his way through in order to get the Ventures out of the Monarch's grasp.

He slid one of the doors to the room partly open.

The room stretched a long way to the left, less so the the right. The minions were standing in close formation around the Monarch and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, their attention focused on the drama in front of them. No one was idly looking around, no one was looking at the doors.

The Ventures were lined up against the far wall. That wall was bullet, dart and flame-proof, as one would expect from a combat training room. Inset all along the wall were rings, used for tying various things up. The two boys and their father were currently tied up there, arms spread out like they were being crucified there, which, in a way, they were.

The Monarch was pacing around in front of them, a portable flamethrower cradled in his arm. Charred splotches littered the wall around their bodies. Parts of their clothes had been burned away, the skin beneath red and blistering. He was ranting something about Art and and Dr. Venture's inability to recognize Art when he heard it. This was punctuated by the occasional blast from the flame-thrower.

"This is all because I laughed at our poetry?" Dr. Venture finally snapped. "You have been harassing me and my sons for twenty years because of something I said about your poems? They were terrible, they deserved mocking," this was directed at Hank and Dean. "He spent his entire time in Creative Writing, writing these overtly erotic poems about butterflies. But he was rhyming things like 'orange' with 'loins'. Loin does not rhyme with orange. It needs a "g" sound in it for the rhyme to work. And that's why he's been trying to kill us for twenty years!"

"Dude," Hank began but his father shushed him. "Look, Monarch, lets just get this over with. Kill me if you want, I don't care any more. But let the boys alone, They've never done anything to you. Let them go and have your fun with me."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Venture," the Monarch snarled. "But I intend to torture you to within an inch of your life by killing your sons in front of you!" He shot a random ball of flame in the boys' direction.

Gary realized that he's better get to work, fast!

He withdrew into the hallway and lit the punk stick. He put it between his teeth for easy access then reached into his pockets and pulled out some of his fireworks. He selected four of the smoke bombs and arranged them in his hand for easy throwing. Pushing the door back open, he stepped into the room, took a moment to memorize where everything and everyone was standing, then started lighting and throwing the smoke bombs. Because of the shortened fuses, they started smoking even before they landed on the floor. With the Monarch shouting at the Ventures no one heard them fall. As the smoke started filling the training room Gary brought out three of his M-80s, lit those and tossed them around the room, making sure one landed near the Monarch.

They were off with a deafening bang, the explosions echoing off the metal walls, sending the minions into a panic. Between the smoke from the M-80s and the the smoke bombs it was getting hard to see anything in the room. Hardly before the bang from the M-80 had stopped reverberating in the room Gary was pushing forward through the crowd of minions. He didn't have his knives extended. At the moment he was counting on confusion to make his way easier. If the minions thought he was just another minion blundering around in the darkness they wouldn't react to him pushing through them. But if someone were stabbed that would tell them an enemy was among them.

Even knowing where the wall was, Gary almost ran into it. He slid along it until he found Dean. He extended one of his knives to cut him loose.

"Gary! I'm so glad..." Dean began before the bodyguard shushed him.

"Stay close," he whispered then went on until he found Hank and cut him loose as well.

"It's about time," Dr. Venture snapped while Gary was cutting him loose, but at least he know enough to whisper his complaint.

Grabbing the first hand he could see - Hank's - he hissed "hold hands and follow me." Gary pressed his back to the wall for a moment, visualizing the room that was too smoke filled to see in. He headed off in the direction he remembered the door to be.

The hall beyond was not nearly as smoky as the training room but it was filling with coughing, gasping minions. No one had realized yet that the Cocoon was under attack. Gary pointed towards the stairs leading to the main floor and told them to go. He turned around and reached into his pocket again for the remainder of his fireworks. He lit and tossed his last smoke bomb, lit and tossed a number of round, flat devices, spinners, down the hall. Fire pouring out of them at an angle turned them into swirling, sparking dervishies. As long as the minions didn't know what they were they would be scrambling to avoid the erratically moving sparkers. Gary fled to the stairs, pausing only to toss his last M-80. The crack of it exploding followed him up the stairs.

The Ventures were already out of the Cocoon, running down the gangplank as fast as their scalded limbs could take them. Gary pounded after them, pain lancing through his body with each step. He had never thought of Brock Sampson having to work through pain like this but obviously he had had to. Maybe Sampson's berserker rages, which had always made him such a terrible killing machine, kept him from feeling the pain. Gary wished he could have a little of that right about now

He was half way across the dark lawn, the Ventures already entering their residence, when Gary saw someone stumbling towards him. He could see the silhouette of a large afro and knew that it was Venturestein.

"Hey, Texas, what are you doing?" he asked, catching the other's arm and pulling him to a stop.

"Going home," the resurrected henchman said, as he always did.

"That's not your home," Gary reminded him. "They're trying to kill you." He plucked the syringe with curare out of Texas's chest. "Look, this was filled with poison. They don't know you; they don't recognize you. All they see is some weird looking dude from out of a nightmare! Your home is with me, at the Ventures. We know you. We'll take care of you."

"No. Not home." the creature pulled his hand away from Gary's grasp. He lurched once more towards the Cocoon.

"Texas," Gary cried, running after his friend, grabbing his shoulder. "If you go there, they will kill you!"

Venturestein shook off his hand. He turned an angry face at the Gary. "F-f-f- ... piss off, twenty-one! I'm going home!"

Gary was stunned by Texas's vehemence as well as his suddenly articulated speech. He watched as Venturestein lumbered toward the Cocoon.

There was a whistling sound that ended in a soft thud. Venturestein grunted, then suddenly exploded into flames.

Gary recognized the sparkly green burst of color as coming from a signal-flare. The Monarch stood in the middle of the gangway to the Cocoon fiddling with an oversized pistol. A Very Gun. Texas had walked into the round that had been meant for him!

Texas screamed, loud, agonizing, soul-wrenchingly. Gary took his eyes off the Monarch and looked to see how he could help his friend. He was going to push him to the ground, roll him around to quench the flames but the heat of it was too intense to get close. And there was something wrong about how the resurrected man was burning. People are two-thirds water. They don't actually burn; they're too wet. The charge from the signal-flare should have been all the fire involved, a powder that could be knocked loose while the ignited clothes smothered by rolling on the grass but Venturestein's entire body seemed to be burning. Flames wicked off his arms and head, his shoulders and legs. In the moment that Gary hesitated Venturestein's skin slumped off his body in gruesome sheets. His face began to melt. In another moment Venturestein collapsed to the ground, bones falling freely away from his body. He stopped screaming only because he no longer that lungs.

The stench of his burning flesh was horrendous. Gary almost gagged on it, but rage, rage at the Monarch, filled his mind to the exclusion of pain, odors, and sense.

"Damn you, Monarch. Damn you to hell!" he screamed, and started pawing at his pant leg. He came up with a tiny .22 automatic. The same automatic he had been cleaning when Triana had dropped in just before the Monarch's attack. The meaningless little weapon that the minions had never looked for when they had captured him, just as they had never tried to remove his extendo-claws.

Gary slipped the safety off and took a firing stance, aiming the tiny gun at the distant figure of the Monarch. He fired and noted the bullet ricocheting off the frame of the gangway door's frame. He corrected his aim and fired again. Aim and fired. Aimed and fired.

The Monarch was standing in the middle of the doorway shaking his fist at Gary and, no doubt, ranting on about something. Daring him to hit him, no doubt. The odds of hitting the Monarch at this distance was slim but he had twenty rounds in the magazine. One of them might get lucky.

Suddenly the Monarch took a flop backwards and disappeared from view. Gary paused in his shooting. He hadn't hit the Monarch. He had flopped between rounds from his former henchman. A moment later the door closed and the blinking lights of the propulsion system increased their tempo. The Cocoon rose into the air and drifted north, back in the direction it had come.

[]

Inside the Cocoon the Monarch was scowling at his wife and rubbing the back of his knee where she had kicked him. "What was that all about?" he demanded angrily.

"I didn't want you getting hurt." she answered in her gravelly deep voice.

"Hurt? 21 didn't have a chance in a million of hitting me. Anyway, when did he have the right to shoot at me with a gun!"

"It's in the rules. OSI members may use guns so long as they are smaller than .278 caliber."

"And we can't?"

"It's in the rules, look it up."

"But why'd you kick me? He couldn't hit me with that little peashooter of his." The Monarch had gotten to his feet and was walking around, working off the stiffness from where his wife's high heeled boot had kicked him.

"Gary was coming within three or four feet of you with every shot. Sweetie, I love you dearly. I'm too young to become a widow. Besides I don't look good in black..."

"I don't know, you looked pretty good in that little black nightie last night..."

"Malcolm, focus!"

He hated it when she called him by his birth name. It meant she was really pissed off at him.

"The mission is a failure. The Ventures have escaped. Gary has escaped. The only thing we've accomplished is, apparently, killing that zombie that been hanging out with Gary."

"Gary? Why are you calling him that. He's number 21. He's my minion and he will pay for deserting me! Or," the Monarch paused to look at his wife suspiciously, "are you secretly in love with him."

"Oh, please," Dr. Mrs the Monarch answered, "I won't even dignify that with an answer. But he's not your henchman anymore. He works for the other side and as such I use the name he uses. Just as I use the name you use as a member of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. That's all." She paused, then added in a softer tone, "I like to think I have a big heart but there's only room enough for one man in it, and that's you!"

The Monarch always liked flattery and forgot his suspicions as she pulled him into a tight embrace.

After a minute she pulled away from their kiss, "Besides, the minions are all in a panic. Gary scared the hell out of them. I need you to go among them and rally their spirits and put the fear of the Monarch back into them."

"The fear of the Monarch," her husband repeated. "Yes. They will know such fear!"

[]

Watching the Cocoon sail away out of reach, Gary suddenly felt all the pain and ache and exhaustion of his night's work. There was nothing left of Texas except a pile of his bones and a few odds and ends of mechanical devices Dr. Venture must have used to resurrect him. He sank to his knees and bowed his head and silently mourned the loss of his friend.

[]

next chapter: Epilogue!


	17. Chapter 17

Dawn comes as a series of small events. The sky lightens from black to deep blue. The stars start too disappear one by one as the ambient light increases. Soon the sky becomes lighter still and objects around you start to appear in shadowy black and white. Seeing in color will come much later. Gradually the sky turns a a translucent pale blue and if there are any clouds floating overhead they will be painted in the most delicate shades of orange and yellow and pinks, with undersides of purple and green. Colors so breath-taking that the pre-Raphaelite artists of the last century spent a life-time trying to capture it. And then the sun peeks over the horizon, a ball of incandescent white that drives away all those delicate colors, exposing the world for what it is. Which is not always something one wants to see.

Gary was still sitting on his knees at sun-rise, maybe half-sleeping or just too deep into mourning. As the sun beat into his eyes he stirred, looked around him.

The Cocoon was gone. He's noticed that late last night, but it also hadn't returned. Texas was still dead, still a pile of ash and bones in a seared patch of grass next to him. That hadn't been some horrible dream. His body hurt in a hundred different places. His eyes were swollen and he could barely see out of them. But Dr. Venture, Hank and Dean were alive and that's what counted. Oh, course Dr. Venture would have conniptions if he didn't repair the door to the Panic Room and to the outside of Venture complex. Work, work, work. There was always something that had to be done. No rest for the wicked, or for henchmen...

But first-

Gary forced himself to his feet, stiffened muscles protesting every movement, and staggered off the to the X-1's hanger. Among the stores there he found a large tarp and a shovel. He spread out the tarp next to the remains of Texas and gently picked up his bones and placed them in the center of the tarp. Then with the shovel he started skimming off the ash, along with some of the grass and topsoil and laid it with the bones. He felt that Texas deserved to be buried decently and that meant with as much of the ashes from his involuntary cremation as he could recover.

He worked at his task, trying not to think, trying not to remember who he was burying. Thinking was not good for anything.

"Oh, gross," a girl's voice spoke behind him. Gary started in surprise and in consternation. He hadn't heard her walk up. What if she had been one of the Monarch's minions? Such inattention could be fatal!

He looked back at Triana standing ten feet away, her hand over her mouth, more a reflex of sadness than to prevent hurling, but he didn't say anything. He wasn't in a conversational frame of mind.

"I heard him scream last night," she said. "I mean in my head, like I always do when he's around. Only this was different, louder, more intense. Painful. And then it stopped. Everything stopped. There was this giant vacuum where the cries of the undead souls that made up his body had been. I knew he had died. I wanted to see what happened but I remember what you said about staying out of any fight with The Monarch, so I stayed in the house. I wanted to talk about it with my father but he sleep right through the whole thing. Then this morning I saw you working here so I thought it was ok to come out. What happened?"

Gary ignored her for a moment, hoping she would go away. But she wasn't going to. "He was hit by a signal-flare meant for me." he explained.

Triana watched Gary work for a moment, thinking that over. "Is that normally what happens?" she asked finally .

"No." he replied then decided that wasn't an adequate answer. "It should have been gains of chemicals easily brushed off but he went up like he'd been soaked in kerosene."

Triana watched him shovel some sooty pieces of machinery, circuit boards, some hinges. "It must have been something Dr. Venture did when he revived him." she suggested.

"Yeah."

"So what are you going to do with - with his - remains?" she faltered.

"Bury him," Gary answered testily, as if she had asked something really stupid.

She ignored his tone. "Where?"

"There's a spot near the cave where we found him that seems like a nice place. Shady, not too swampy."

"Is there some way I can help?"

"Don't you have a bus or something to catch?" The words were out out of his mouth before he realized how rude they were. He flushed in embarrassment.

"There's always another bus. Or Dad could drive me. Or I could even ask the Outrider to get me. I..." Triana fell silent, not sure what she wanted to say or how to say it.

"I know I wasn't the best of friends to your friend..." she resumed.

"You wanted him dead."

"But not like this. And ... I mean, he was causing me pain whenever he was near, but that's not the point," she paused and took a deep breath. "He was your friend. He meant a lot to you. I should have tried harder to respect that. I know I can't make it up to him, but I would at least like to do something for you. To make up for it. Because..."

"I'd rather do this alone," Gary interrupted. "I don't need your help."

"Oh." She felt the sting of a rebuke. Gary had finished scooping up the ashes. Laying the shovel aside he started folding up the tarp before rolling it up into a bundle. She opened her mouth to say something but seeing Gary's total concentration on making a shroud for his friend, closed her mouth and started to walk away.

Gary was tying up the tarp with some sting he'd brought along but he saw her turn away out of the corner of his eye. Guilt stuck him. He'd been harsher to the girl than he really meant. And since she was moving back to her mothers, this would be the last time he's see her in a while. He didn't want her leaving thinking ill of him.

"Triana..." he called to her. The girl stopped, turned around to face him. Her face was set. She waited for him to continue.

"I - I've always appreciated your friendship. It's been a pleasure knowing you. I've treasured that. This ... this is something I have to do alone. Any other time I would have welcome your help but today..." He trailed off, not sure how to continue, watching her face to see how she was taking his apology. He wasn't expecting her to turn ashen.

"Gary," she began, "you're not planning to do anything - rash?"

"Huh?"

"You know..."

Gary didn't. He considered what things he could be doing that might be considered 'rash.' He was just burying his dead friend. He wanted some time alone to thing about things, to think about all the friends who had died before him. "You think I'm going to kill myself?" it suddenly dawned on him what Triana meant.

"Well, you were talking in the past tense just now, like you were saying good-by."

"No-o-o! I'm not planning anything like that. Sheesh! Henchmen don't have time to get all weepy and melancholy. I've got a ton of stuff to do today. Dr. Venture is going to give me hell for not fixing the doors from the time Kim attacked. It's my fault that they got hurt last night. But before getting reamed by him I just want some alone time."

"To do that which you say you don't do?" Triana teased.

"We all need to be alone with our thoughts some times."

"But not to do anything ... stupid?"

"No. Of course not."

Triana watched Gary closing, looking for any sign that he was lying or being disingenuous.

"Ok," she decided. "I'd better get packed if I want to meet that bus. But if there is anything I can do for you..."

"I can get along," Gary interrupted. Then realized that he was being churlish again. "Ah, text when you can. I'll look forward to it." He flashed her a brief smile.

"Yeah. Sure." And she finally walked away.

Gary hefted the bundle of his friend's remains, picked up the shovel and headed off toward the woods at the back of the Venture compound. He passed the small graveyard where Jonas Venture, Sr. was supposed to be buried, but was not. He wondered for a moment where where all the previous Venture brothers had been buried? There were, what, fourteen previous pairs, according to the briefing he had from Brock Sampson. Brock had obviously loved the boys but seemed uncomfortable talking about any of the previous clones. Gary suspected that there was something Brock didn't want to admit but he had never thought about what it could be. As long as he'd never have to dig a grave for any of the Ventures he would be all right.

He walked past the fake cemetery and into the woods. He picked his way carefully through the trees and found the cave after only getting lost once. He laid his burden down and looked around until he found the exact location he wanted.

He started digging.

The grave he dug was three feet wide and four feet long and four feet deep. There was no need to dig a full six feet down. It wasn't like these seared bones were going to attract wild animals. And since all that was left of Texas/Venturestein were a pile of bones it didn't need to be very long either.

He laid the bones on the bottom reverently then slowly began shovelling the soil back in. He felt a twinge, a strong ache, as the dirt covered over the canvas roll. "Bye-good old friend," he breathed, then finished filling in the grave.

He'd seen a boulder, maybe eighteen inches across, as he'd come in. He went back and started rolling the stone back. He placed it at the head of the grave. Later he'd come back with an engraving tool and carve a proper legend on it.

He stood back to inspect his work. He liked it. He hoped Texas liked it as well. He had always assumed there was an afterlife.

Gary sat down on the stone that would be Texas' head stone and tried to remember all that he could about the former henchman. After a time he felt a gentle touch on his shoulder. Had Triana followed him after all?

He looked to his left and saw a green, leafy frond resting on his shoulder. A glance to his right revealed a small tree standing next to him. It hadn't been there a minute before. "He was a friend," a voice sounded. It was kind of tinny, artificial, like that Hawkings guy, or some old 8-bit Atari game. He couldn't tell where the voice was coming from.

"Now you show up," he said.

"Of course." the voice cheerfully answered. "It's the first principle of comedy. The object of desire can never be found until the desire to find the object has ceased."

"You mean you've been hiding from me because I was looking for you?"

"It was fun playing cat-and-mouse."

"For you, maybe." Gary looked at the talking tree. It was small, only about 9 feet tall, with a trunk that was green, not brown, like a normal tree. The trunk rose smoothly from the ground for about five feet before sprouting into a series of branches that ended in balls of tightly curled green leaves. It really did looked like a head of broccoli.

"You looked after Texas when he first arrived here?" Gary asked.

"Yes. He was a lost soul. A naif. It was my duty as civilized plant to take care of him. I found him this cave where he could sleep out of the weather. I found him food. I talked with him because you animals, I've found, need to talk to each other. I liked him a lot. He laughed at my jokes."

"Jokes?"

"I love comedy. I have been a student of the art form for years. 'Take my wife...Please,' 'I met a man who said he hadn't had a bit in three days... so I bit him!' It is the greatest invention of your kind. It is something missing from my people." The leaves of the tree rustled for a moment, then he continued. "My people are very logical, you see. As plants we don't have nervous systems, lymph glands, adrenaline and so on."

"So you don't have any emotions, like Mr. Spock."

"Ah, a fan of the Sci-Fi you are?" The creatures voice unexpectedly took on the tone of Yoda. Then continued in its regular, mechanical tone. "But, you misunderstand the situation. The character of Mr. Spock had plenty of emotions, he just repressed all of them, which is why his kind went crazy when they went into rut. The mating instincts overwhelmed his determination to remain in control. Our kind simple have no emotions."

"No fear, anger, love, happiness, ambition?"

"No guilt since we always do the logical thing - as we see it, of course. Sometimes we realize later on that there was some other course that might have had better outcomes but since we always act in the most logical manner at the time we do not feel reprobation because we didn't do something differently."

"Must be nice," Gary said. "So what are you doing here?"

"Do you mean on earth, or in the Venture's woods, or standing here talking to you? Or do you mean all three? That's is why I felt in love you animals. Your language is so imprecise, so full of double meanings, confusion. As plants, as logical beings our language says exactly what we mean, no more, no less. It seems like a good thing but one wonders - I wondered - whether our language adequately expressed the uncertainties in life? Wouldn't life be more fun if you had to guess at the meaning of what someone says rather than knowing precisely what they meant?"

"No, I don't see it as fun at all. Too much of life gets messed up by misunderstandings."

"Ah, a conformist. My people were not impressed with my discovery of comedy either. They found me annoying and asked - told - me to leave. So I came here to the Venture lands where no one would think twice about a walking tree."

Gary thought about that for a moment. "I can see where you'd get that idea. I've often thought that the Ventures were at the center of weird. So where do you come from, somehow I'm guessing not Earth?"

"It's Mars. I'm a Martian."

"If Mars is inhabited how's come none of the space probes we sent there have ever seen you?"

"Have you ever been to the surface of Mars? No, of course not. How silly of me. It's cold and dry and with no atmosphere to speak of. We have to move into vast underground bunkers millions of years ago because the surface was just too harsh.

"Are you one of those Secret Martians Hank and Dean were talking about?" Gary accused. "The ones that almost started an interplanetary war when Dean said 'Hello' into a radio?"

"Yes, guilty."

"Not very logical."

"Actually very logical, if misguided. Because you animals are guided by a bunch of hormonal tidal waves you are very unstable, very illogical. Obviously to the logical mind that makes you inferior - "

"Hey," Gary interjected.

"To the logical mind, I said. In their brilliant, crystalline logic my people decided that animals were inferior creations and therefore there was no point to every talking to them. Also, in my my language 'hello' is a terrible insult."

"How can a logical race have insults?"

The leaves of the tree shook for a moment, filling the air with a delicate tinkling like a forest of wind-chimes in a light breeze. "Exactly! That is why I love studying you animals. Your lives are filled with contradictions. You don't deny contradictions, your comedy relishes them. Just because our species lacks emotions and thinks only logically doesn't mean that we all think from the same premises. Or all have the same ideas. 'Hello' in my language means something like 'animal lover.' And of course that is meant literally."

So by saying 'hello' we were accusing you Martians of having carnal knowledge with an animal?"

"You understand the situation."

"So how did we avoid World War III?"

"I intervened," the tree said without hesitation or any note of pride or accomplishment.

"I translated what the human had mean into Martian, explained the illogic of thinking he knew what he was saying. It was touch and go for a while."

"Why did you bother?"

"I didn't want anti-matter bombs being dropped on me."

"Who does. So what you going to do now?" Gary asked.

"I should ask that of you. As for me nothing really has changed. In the future I shall hide from you as I have in the past. I shall listen in to your radio programs and television shows. It would be nice to see what it is you animals see from the television transmissions but since my people don't have eyes it would hardly be the same."

"How do you see?"

"Each leaf is a photo receptor. Not only does it provide energy for us but by analyzing the light falling on each leaf we have a sense of what is around us. It's nothing like your focused imaging, however that works. But I've filled the years studying your kind from audio transmissions, some adroit spying and my thoughts. Unlike you animals we plants can live for years with just our own thoughts. But what about you. I've seen how attentive you have been with our mutual friend, how hard you've tried to awaken his damaged mind. What will you do now?"

Gary sighed and thought long about that. "No much, I guess. Keep on doing the things I was doing before finding Texas. As a henchman there really isn't much else to do.

"And this will make you happy."

"What does a 'logical' species know about happiness, that's an emotion."

"Happiness is achieving what you desire. We plant people desire clear thinking, so solving a complex problem brings much satisfaction. Maybe not the emotional flood of you animals but a satisfaction still. Have you no desires?"

"I'd like to find Kim, of course."

"That was the female who tried to kill you?"

"You saw that?"

"I'm very adroit at spying. But I'm confused why she wanted to kill you. I thought you two were in rut?"

"She got it into here head that she wants to be a super-villain. And for her first Arch she wanted to kill Hank Venture."

"I can't help thinking that even for animals this is really messed up."

"You haven't heard the half of it," Gary assured him. "Kim and I had been dating... I guess your people might say we had been 'helloing' a lot..."

The tree started shaking violently and even slid a couple feet back on the slope it was standing on, though Gary couldn't see how it had moved. Its feet or roots or whatever were hidden inside it's trunk. "Oh, 'hello' indeed. That is a good one. I love you already!"

Gary smiled. He wasn't in the habit of cracking jokes, wasn't any good at telling the few jokes he could remember but the word had so suggested itself. He and Kim had never really gone out on a date, it had been pure hard sex from the first time they'd met.

"So, anyway," he continued when the tree stopped rustling, "I didn't know she was trying to kill Hank and she didn't know that I was Hank's bodyguard. Not until that night..." Gary's voice trailed away. He didn't know how to go on.

"So you had to hurt the one you loved."

"Yeah. I miss her so much. I'd died if I could see her again. But I know if I do she'll still be trying to kill Hank, and I'll have to stop her."

"I see no easy solution to that, though I will give it much thought in the years ahead. It will be a masterpiece thesis for me. A grand consideration."

"Yeah, good luck with that. I've also thought about finding out who killed 24."

"This is a friend of your?" the tree asked.

"Oh, yeah. He was my best friend in the Cocoon. We were inseperable."

"You were lovers?"

"No! Nothing like that. We were as straight as an arrow. We just hung out together, constantly. He was killed in an explosion a couple years ago. I see his ghost from time to time, having conversations with him like I am with you know. But no one seems to know who set off the explosion or why. I'd like to get to the bottom of that. Maybe it would easy 24's spirit."

"O-o-o, a mystery. I love a mystery! So how did it haqppen? Do you have a list of suspects?" The tree seemed to shiver in anticipation. It struck Gary that the tree was acting very excited for someone-thing- who was supposed to have no emotions. It made him wonder just how unemotional these Martians really were.

"We had captured Dr. Venture's robot. I mean The Monarch had. But I was working for him at the time, so I guess 'we' is right. Anyway we interrogated the robot to get some information out of him. We had promised to get him go if he told us this information. So we were, but The Monarch has installed a bomb inside the robot's chest cavity. The idea was to let the robot reunite with the Ventures and blow them all up together. The detonator switch was installed in the throne room in the Cocoon and Dr. MrsThe Monarch was in charge of it while the Monarch, 24 and me drove the robot back to the Venture Compound in the Monarchmobile. But when we got here the OSI was already here attacking the Ventures.

"I remember that. I was here. There were a lot of people shooting at each other. And the Dr. Venture unleashed his army of clones. I was impressed. I didn't think he had advanced that far in science. Go on."

"Well, the Monarch ordered his minions into the fray. He left the car to organize things. And to try out some enhancements to his costume. That didn't go well, so Dr. Mrs. The Monarch left the Cocoon to directly take charge of the situation. I'd left the car but 24 hadn't. Then the car blow up, killing 24 and, I though, destorying the robot but apparently the robot's head survived and Dr. Venture, instead of rebuilding HELPR's body, just mounted it on his giant walking spider device."

"I've see that." the tree said.

"Well, that's pretty much it. Someone had to have pressed the detonation switch but no one seems to know who or why. I made up a list of suspects and started investigating but never got anywhere."

"Who was on your list? Who was your number one suspect?"

"I was at the top of the list."

"Why would you want to kill your own friend."

"That's just it, I wouldn't. But I felt that if I had been a better friend 24 would be alive today. We'd been arguing again so he was in a snit. But also his seatbelt had Ihad been there maybe I could have released the belt."

"Or died with him in the blast."

"Yeah." The way Gary said that implied that he had thought about that before.

"So you blame yourself for surviving, for being alive when he isn't." the tree said.

Gary didn't answer.

"This is, of course, faulty thinking. You didn't know the bomb was going to explode so there was no reason for you to remain in the car or to make more of an effort to help your friend to escape. As far as you knew he was as safe inside the car as anywhere, perhaps safer since he was out in the midst of the conflict."

"Still I feel guilty that he's dead and I'm alive. I wonder sometimes whether I really see his ghost or if it's just a projection of my guilt."

"There is no way to resolve that question through logic," the tree said. "Who was next on your list?"

"The Ventures. I even went so far as to kidnap the boy and try to torture them. It turns out the the Chinese Water Torture isn't much of a form of torture. And of course why would they want to destroy their robot. They treated it like part of their family.I don't know I thought they might be responsible. I guess I was just hating on them because The Monarch hates them so much.

"Who else was on your list?"

The Monarch insisted thatIadd him to the list. I guess he just hated to be left out of things but while he planned to destroy the robot he didn't really hate 24 or me that much. We were his oldest and most loyal henchmen."

"Oldest in the sense that you survived all the combats that he killed off the other henchmen," the tree said. "Oldest in the sense that you must have been shirking your duty to survive all the time."

"You think the Monarch was trying to kill us?" Gary was surprised at the thought. "But he continued to rely on me for everything. Wouldn't he have tried again if he wanted me dead?"

"Perhaps. Who else was on your list?"

"Next was the Murderous Moppets."

"Who are they?"

"They're a pair of midgets, or maybe dwarves, I forget how that works. They worked for Dr. Mrs. The Monarch back when she was Lady Au Pair and doing villany on her own."

"I think I have seen them. So their species are call midgets."

"Species? No they're as human as you or - well, as I am. They just have a gladular condtion that stunted their growth. The guys are about 40 but look like they're four or five. At least when they remember to shave."

"Why do you think they wanted to kill 24?"

"Oh, they've had it in for him, and for me, for some time. 24 talked back to them when they were trying to take over the Cocoon and they never forgave him for that."

"So they had plenty of motive," the tree said. "I don't recall seeing them during the fight out here on the Venture grounds so they must have been in your mobile nursery."

"The Cocoon? Yeah. So they could have had access to the detonator when Dr. Mrs. The Monarch leave to help her husband. But you know, I never placed them high on my list. 'Cause they were knife people. They liked to show people the knife they're holding before sticking in you. They'd stabbed 24 once before, and I'm sure that if they were determined to do him in they'd use a knife. So even if they knew they could blew 24 up I doubt that they would."

"Well argued. Very logical. So who else was on your list?" the tree asked.

Gary shrugged. "No one actually. I just couldn't think of anyone else."

"Oh, goodie. Let's think about this. There were four people in the car. You, your friend, your Monarch and the robot. There's no one who has any reason to destroy the robot in and of itself. Likewise while you have some enemies, none of them seem like the kind of people who would go out of their way to destroy you. So that leaves your Monarch. Does he have enemies?"

"Lots."

"Such as?"

"There's Captain Sunshine. The Monarch killed one of his skidekicks, Wonder Boy. He replaces them every few years anyway so I don't know how serously Captain Sunshine considers the matter. And there's Seargent Hatred. We were stealing him blind for years for parts for the Cocoon. But supposedly he was aslready enacting a revenge on the Monarch when he took over at Dr. Venture's nemesis. Then there's Phantom Limb. He's pissed because The Monarch took Dr. Girlfriend away from him. Well, she's Dr. Mrs. The Monarch these days. And Queen Atheria back when she was with Phantom Limb."

"I don't think I know him," the tree said.

"You couldn't mistake him if you've ever seen him. His arms and legs are invisible. All you see is a walking torso. His arms and legs are still there, and he can kill a man wth an electric shock from his hands.I've heard a lot of theories about what happened to his arms and legs but I don't know which one to believe."

"No, I'm not familiar with him. These characters, Dr. Girlfriend, Dr. Mrs the Monarch and Queen Atheria are these separate people?"

"No. It's the one woman. She's just had a bunch of names over the years. Currently she goes by Dr. mrs. The Monarch."

"It's that a bit long for a name?" the tree asked.

"It could be worse, I suppose."

"So why weren't any of these people on your list of who killed 24?"

"Oh, well. Captain Sunshine has natural superpowers. If he wanted to injure The Monarch he could have at any time. He didn't need to use a bomb. While Sgt. Hatred and Phantom Limb would need to know that there was a bomb in play, would need to know where the detonator was, and be able to get into the Cocoon to press the button. They're both pretty obvious characters. Phantom Limb with his invisible arms and Sgt hantred is this big, fat guy. Either one would be spotted in a second."

"So," the tree wondered, "who ever did it would have had to have been someone already in the Cocoon, someone capable of passing as one of the Monarch's minions."

"I hadn't thought about that, but you're right."

"Aside from yourself, is there anyone who could pass as a minion who had it in for the Monarch?"

"Back then the Monarch was my main man..." Gary bowed his head in thought. A minion who hated the Monarch? There didn't seem to be any. Most of them ended up dead at some point in their short lives. He and 24 had, for a time, actually joked about how they were immortal, or at least invulernable, because they had been sent out on all these missions and had come back alive. Just as they had joked that Hank and Dean were unkillable because they had killed them once and the boys had come back. But that was before he knew about their father's clone farm.

Someone else had come back from the dead. Or seemed to have, though in truth they had avoided dying in the first place. Scott Hall. Henchman #1. Gary began explaining to the tree.

"So he was sent out on a mission with you and 24 and didn't come back because he ran into Brock Sampson?"

"And apparently he got away from Sampson still alive, which is pretty rare. So all he would have to do was walk into the Cocoon. He already had the uniform. he'd just need to change the number on the uniform and keep in the background. Biding his time until the right opportunity came along."

"To kill you or the Monarch?" the tree wondered.

"Maybe he was hoping to get all three of us. Maybe because that plan didn't work out he went crazy. His next scheme was to kidnap all sorts of sidekicks and henchmen and force them to fight each other to the death. That was a pretty ugly scene. A lot of good people died before we were able to stage a revolt and escape. The last anyone saw of Scott Hall he was running away from a pack of super-villains. I suppose if he could eacape getting killed by Brock Sampson he could escape from them as well. But he's laid low since."

"Of course. Scott Hall, ol' Hencham #1 and one-time villain 'Zero' had to have done it. No one else had means motive or opportunity. Thanks!" He looked for the tree but there was no one beside him. "Oh, great. I'm going psychotic again!" Then he noticed that the dirt around him had been disturbed. It was slight but clear that thousands of tiny feet had shuffled along the ground. "Ah, the Wrascally Wabbit once again fades from sight."

Gary got up, dusted off his pants and picked up his shovel. "Well, Texas," he said. "Loooks like you've got a friend to look after all."

He was nearing the Residence when he found Dr. Venture charging towards him. The scientist looked angrier than usual. he was clutching a sheave of paper in his hand, waving them at Gary as soon as he said the big bodyguard.

"Alpaca, you ninny! You swiped a pile of alpaca hair. How could you be to stupid!"

"What are you talking about?" Gary demanded.

"Those hairs your stoled. The ones that were supposed to be my father's Well, they're not. They're not my father's they're not even human. According this this report they are most likely from an alpaca llama. How could you mistake alpaca fur for human hair?"

Gary gathered up the front the Dr. Venture's uniform and easily lifted the small man into the air. "Listen! I already buried a friend this mornng, Don't make me bury as fake scientist as well!' he dropped Dr. Venture as easily as he picked him up. "You were there when we identified your father's exhibit as that hair dressing museum. I went back and got the hair from that exhibit and no where else. If it's not your father's hair, then the museum must have lost it years ago and faked it with this llama hair. I took what you told me to take. If it's not what you wanted, life's unfair like that."

"But now I'll never know if I'm a clone or not."

"If it's good enough for your sons it's good enough for you."

"But it's not good eough!"

"Live with it."


End file.
